Lâche pas la patate! (Don't Drop the Potato!)

One of the childhood games I remember playing was called "Hot Potato." Several of us would sit in a circle; one of us holding an object dubbed the "potato." The object of the game was to toss the potato to another person in the circle who, in turn, had to quickly, without fully wrapping fingers around the "hot potato," toss it to another person--and so on until you missed the catch or were deemed to have held that potato too long in your hands and were declared "burned" by your fellow players.

January to June must be the busiest time of the gardening year. I've been starting plants from seeds, transplanting seedlings, watering the garden, turning compost, watering the garden, fertilizing, spraying, and did I mention watering the garden? This blog has been preying on my guilty mind, but there was just no time to get here. Now that temperatures are up in the nineties, I am trying to postpone the heavy-lifting until late afternoon. I thought this might be the perfect time to spend a minute to show you the potato harvest.

Luckily, my friend Jim stops by on a regular basis to give me some garden guidance. I told him I thought my potato plants were looking poorly--pale green, spotted leaves, spindly stalks--what did they need? The answer was simple: they needed to be harvested. 

The cage has been removed and the plant emptied
into a large bin for easy potato diving.

Low and behold! I had no idea they grew down there
at the bottom of the plant!

French fingerling potatoes--all shiny and new.

Just a beautiful sight.

Jim explains the difference between old and new potatoes--dark
ones are the seed potatoes, lighter ones are the new potatoes.

I am thrilled with my little harvest.  Isn't life grand?

Old and new potatoes to be roasted with olive oil, salt, and pepper.

Buttercrean and Russian bananas harvested
a few days later went into my annual
potato salad.

Growing potatoes in containers can work. There is room for improvement, however, and there are a couple of things I will do differently next time. I will err on the side of planting too few potatoes per pot instead of too many in order to give the potatoes more room to grow, and I will probably not go quite so high with my "hills." I think the plants could have used a rest from having to reach so high throughout their growing season. They should have been able to kick back and relax after stretching a foot and a half up the cage. At least, those are my theories. And of course, my garden is always about experimentation.

Now, back to that wonderful Cajun French idiom, "Lâche pas la patate!"  (Don't drop the potato!) Unlike the game I played as a child, this phrase isn't really referring to a potato at all. It means that you should keep going, manage all of the things you have to do, and get them done. No small task for a gardener. No small task for a gardener who wants to keep a blog about the experience. But here I go. "Lâche pas la patate!"