I teach color theory every spring, and when we talk about color psychology I always say that blue is an appetite suppressant because there are no naturally occurring blue foods. I’ll have to add an asterisk to my lecture next semester. We grew these blue potatoes this year, and when they are mashed, they make the most impressive blue color. They get a little more purple when they’re heated up.
The potatoes in the drawer have been getting a little out of hand, but since we grew them ourselves last year, it seemed like a shame to throw them out. So they are back in the ground as of this afternoon, long, scary tendrils and all. I used the same containers I made last year (a garbage can cut in half) and the old glass recycling bin that used to hold herbs. I did one container of purple potatoes from our drawer, one of Yukon Golds from our drawer, and one bag of seed potatoes from Lowe’s. We’ll see how each type does.
The technique I’m using for growing them is something I read awhile back – you plant them in a shallow bit of soil, and as the plants grow, you keep adding dirt to bury them more and more. It seemed to work OK last year, though toward the end it got a little hard to add dirt with all the leaves growing on the plants.
We got seed potatoes a month or so ago and they’ve been sitting on the back porch waiting to be planted. The spot we planted potatoes in last year wasn’t great… it didn’t get a lot of sun and was hard to water. We still got a handful of potatoes, but we’re hoping for more this weekend. We took the kids to Barnes and Noble to play at the train table this weekend, and I always grab some reading material to browse while they wreak havoc on Thomas and his friends. I grabbed a gardening book, and one good idea it had was to cut an old garbage can in half and plant potatoes in that. Thus, my project this weekend, topped off with some compost from the batch that just finished up:
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