weary of waiting for the postal bureaucracy to untangle the whereabouts of my seed potatoes i went out and found a local ( and new replacement ) supplier and bought a few pounds of red nordlands because i am familiar with them...i took enough out of the bag to cut for the iu northwest community garden and washed them thoroughly...i inspected each spud and cut at least an ounce of starchy flesh off with several "eyes" on each piece ( most of these were small enough that this just entailed cutting them in half ) while cutting off a bad spot on one i discovered it had "greened" because it was exposed to direct sunlight...darkness, or at least indirect lighting, will be a part of the storage experiment...sunlight causes a build up of alkaloids in the starch and too much green potato isn't good for you...i set the cut pieces in a cardboard box ( from sunbelle blueberries ) to callus for the next couple of days...this puts a hard layer on the starch to help prevent pests and diseases from attacking the tuber while it germinates...the plan is to head for the iuncg on sunday and put them in the bed with the teosinte...long about the official planting day there i will add hopi blue maize and sweet corn to the bed...there will be more after the potatoes are done sometime in early july...but that is another blog on a wholly organic matter...more on sunday as the season gets its second planting.
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