PotaTOES

Tee hee! I just found out that I grew the four tiniest potatoes. They came from a fingerling potato that just grew before I could eat it. Well, actually, that happens to most of the potatoes I buy. Like so.


Every so often I get the urge to plant a sprouted potato, and last year, one took off particularly well. But not getting enough light in my cave, it was a little stringy. So I put it on the patio where it lived until I forgot to water it for long enough then it died. And ever since then, it's been one of those plants where I assume the neighbors walk by and ask them selves why I don't care enough to keep up with it. Until today when I was cleaning the patio.

I was cleaning the patio because I got tile mastic dust all over the dried leaves and the dust already on it. I finally got around to grinding the old mastic off the kitchen floor tiles I pried up in January. It took more effort than I would have expected and was quite a PITA. After I gave up on the chisel attachment and moved to the grinder attachment shown here, it worked better and resulted in this crowning achievement. And 80 layers of dust. (Yes, I was dumb enough to try it inside on the first tile and now I need to evict concrete dust from my carpet and everything else. The vacuum just couldn't keep up.)



So to anyone wondering why I haven't been faster at finishing the kitchen, this is one reason. The tiles, they are pesky. But for the fact that I need to pry off 5 more and clean 3 of them, I'm done with the existing set. Whew!

And in the cleanup, I decided to toss the old, dead potato plant. I got it to the front door and realized that the dirt wasn't bad (if you have a diseased plant you should toss the dirt, not reuse it), it was just dry. So I scattered it at the base of the evil fern that guards my entrance. And I noticed something that looked like a pod of spider eggs. I got a little wigged out but figured I'd rather pick it up and get rid of it then move spiders around.

Turns out, it wasn't a spider egg pod, but a tiny little potato! And there were more! In all, I found four tiny little, um, toeling potatoes.



As you can see, they did not get big enough to be even finger sized despite fingerling parentage. They're like the cutest potatoes evah. And they were still plump like they were brand new, despite the parent plant dying in maybe November. No wonder people like potatoes, they're self storing if you just leave them be. These barely had a chance, and certainly didn't get bigger after the leaves died, but they stayed plump and juicy. I know because I ate 3 of them. I think they even tasted cute.