Fingerling Potatoes

Cost/benefit analyses. We try to do them as gardeners, saying, "Oh, it'll be much cheaper to grow x instead of buy it in the store. I'm just saving money." It rarely works out that way, does it? That's one of the main reasons I was drawn to fingerling potatoes. In the store, they're about $3.99 a pound when you can find them. So I figured, hey, 5 bucks for a few seed pieces, get 3-4 pounds, for a net profit of around seven bucks, and super-fresh fingerlings. Well, I got the super-fresh fingerlings, but after paying for soil and all the fertilizer these plants kept eating (oh, how they nom nom nom the fertilizer!), I probably came close to breaking even. If I would have been going organic for these potatoes, I would have been well in the hole.

I would have left these guys well enough alone for a couple more weeks, but the squirrels are getting aggressive, and had begun to unearth the plants as they started to die back and were stealing the potatoes. I didn't even realize they liked raw potatoes.

These in the picture are my Russian Banana fingerlings, chosen because they're supposed to be fairly versatile, in addition to the fact that I've had them before and enjoyed them. The range in sizes, though, is pretty insane. Everything from the size of a pea to the size of a real baking potato on these guys, which is going to make cooking them a chore.