I love it when something is more successful than I hoped. Voila a bowl of fingerling potatoes.
Sometime in March I discovered the last few potatoes in a bag were a bit beyond eating. I hate that. I hate when food goes to waste.
My friend Douglas Welch at A Gardener’s Notebook stuck a few old potatoes in the ground in his garden and the plants were growing well. So I decided there was nothing to lose. (See our adventure to a local Garden Show).
My six old potatoes were cut into pieces with visible eyes (the beginnings of new plant growth) and stuck in two rows in my raised beds.
I’ve watered them occasionally and added additional soil around them as they grew. Really, it was minimal care. About a week ago some of the plants started dying back. So this morning I went potato digging and what did I find? Fingerling potatoes!
I only dug up about half of the plants and I already have more than twice the amount of potatoes I put in the ground. Potatoes are amazing. And perhaps this is a lesson for me: Potatoes seem to grow well in the soil and amount of light in my vegetable garden. Perhaps this is a crop I should plant more often.
This is what sustainability is all about. Reducing waste, growing food in a minimal footprint. Tonight we will have fresh potatoes for dinner. It is a good start to the day.
This summer we've been taking on some large re-thinking projects:
We also applied an old mindset to a new addition. We rebuilt a stairway on the side of our house with repurposed lumber. The 2x4s that we used were all leftovers from someone's building project that hadn't been used and had been set aside. Instead of adding this perfectly good lumber to a landfill, we brought home.
Yes, there were some rough edges here and there that couldn't be used, but this lumber was seasoned (thoroughly dried) making it less likely to warp or twist. We even were able to scrape down the old hand railing and reuse it. Primed and painted our new staircase should last for years.
Sustainable thinking applies to small things like reuseable shopping bags as well as big things like using wood that has already been harvested. Lumber is a precious resource. Wood shouldn't be wasted to end up in landfills and trees shouldn't be cut down without good reason.
