Fresh Potatoes for Dinner!

I have two types of potatoes planted in my garden this year, Reddale (a waxy red potato) and Butte (a russet baking potato). Due to my impatience I occasionally dig around under the plants just to see if anything is growing. The Reddales have been easy to find, but I had never been able to locate anything under my Butte plants.

I week or so ago I dug up my sickliest looking Reddale and harvested several potatoes from it (sorry, no pictures). Today I decided just to dig up one of the Butte plants to see what was underneath, and the picture shows what I found. To put it in perspective, this is a salad plate (9"?). The skin is mottled because they are still young and the skin rubs off if you scrub them at all. All in all I pulled out 1lb 11 oz of potatoes from that plant. Given that the portion of potato it grew from was probably no more than 2oz, that is a 13.5::1 ration of harvested potato to seed, not bad!

Like I said, these potatoes are still young. Left in the ground they would have continued to grow into much larger potatoes, for an even better yield. Lets hope the rest of the plants continue to do well and give us a huge pile of potatoes in a month or so.