Blue Potatoes

Every year for the past three years, Cupcake and I have tried to plant, grow and harvest a new veggie in the garden. This year we hit on two. The first was from the mind of the Alphageek and will be a follow up post, just because they have yet to come in, so we got nothing to show just yet. I guess you can call this a veggie teaser?

We decided our second new veggie would be blue potatoes (yeah, we didnt know they came in blue either) but Cupcake found a picture of some, and the seed was planted (pun intended).  Our first step was finding seed. After a bit of internet research, we found Southern States sold blue seed potatoes, for $25 a pound. That seemed a bit high to us, so we kept looking. As luck would have it, a few days later was grocery day. Our bi-monthly visit to Wallyworld found us in the produce isle, and we found a potato medley that contained red, white and BLUE potatoes for a couple dollars a bag. We bought two bags and had enough blue ones for a row.

We left them out in the garage until they started to sprout, then planted them the week of Good Friday. Only two hills came up, and because of all the rain we figured the seed rotted in the ground, so back to Wallyworld, two more bags, and tried it again. This time most of the seed came up, only to be greeted by this little fellow...

If this were a Bugs Bunny cartoon, his name would be "Potato Eat-est". But it's not and I dont know the scientific name for him, but he's a pest of the first order. I used seven dust for a couple months, which I feel certain is potato bug steroids.   Then Cupcake, being the research specialist in the family, found this...

We already had the stuff on hand, since it's used to beat down flies in the chicken coop. I sprinkled some on the potato vines, and it was problem solved, problem staying solved.  Yesterday while I was tinkering in the garden I noticed the first two vines that came up had pretty much made themselves, so I dug the hills and this is what we found....

The ones on the left side will be held in reserve for next year's seed. We will probably try a couple of the big ones this week because we're dying to see what a blue potato tastes like. The rest we will can in our "red, white and blue" medley, another post to follow. 
K&K