Greater Expectations

New Potatoes no bigger than golf balls.

It doesn’t look like we’ll be bringing home the wheel barrels of potatoes that we happily found ourselves with last year.  Half of our crop is already done.  We planted two varieties of potatoes, Charlotte and Rosabelle, and we are discovering the Rosabelle potato plants are sensitive to mildew.  They’re already done growing, even though it’s 3 to 4 weeks earlier than last year.  We always dig some up early and enjoy “new potatoes”, but this year’s crop will solely consist of them.  Potato plants end up wilting away by mid to late summer, signaling it’s time for us to dig to them up and see what we’ve got, but it looks like this is not the year for us to stock up on potatoes.  The Charlotte potato plants are still growing, so there is hope, but until then, it looks like we’ll be feasting on small new potatoes for some time.

It doesn't take a trained eye to see what plants are the Rosabelle and what plants are the Charlotte potatoes.