Pulling in Potatoes: Adirondack Blue Success

Growing potatoes at our previous property was quite disappointing. We had issues with rot, insects, blight, terrible yields and more.

The dirt was atrociously bad, acid and worthless. Even with fertilization, cover crops and amendments, the potatoes failed to yield well at all. We might have done been better off eating the seed potatoes instead of planting them.

Here on the new property, we are really starting to see the difference between dirt and soil. The initial yields are coming in for spring and it’s looking much better.

We pulled 23lbs of Adirondack Blue potatoes yesterday.

The scale is one pound off, so we always have to subtract a pound when we weigh.

We’ve already made up for the amount of seed potatoes we planted  and still have a half-bed and and another 5′ x 5′ patch of potatoes to pull.

Most of the Adirondack Blue potatoes were planted in one of the yam beds, which you can see better in this video we posted yesterday.

The yams produce in later fall, early winter, and the potatoes produce in spring. By alternating harvests we can get two high-calorie yields from the same space.

Last night Rachel baked two trays of blue potatoes for dinner and we had friends over to enjoyed our strangely colored spuds. They don’t taste different from white potatoes, that I can tell, but they do bake to a pale lavender color which is quite fun. Apparently, the anthocyanin content makes blue potatoes healthier for you than plain white ones.

However healthy they are, they sure are fun to grow. I was pleasantly surprised by the vigor and yield of the Adirondack Blue variety in our Lower Alabama backyard. Many of the potatoes were of a good size and the productivity was high per plant, especially considering that we had cut each seed potato into small pieces with single eyes.

We’ll grow these again. We also got a plant that set fruit, so we hope to plant those seeds next year and see what interesting potato plants result.

The Adirondack Blue potatoes also grew and died back faster than our Yukon Golds, Russet, Red La Soda, Pontiac and Kennebec potatoes, producing a good yield in a short time period. This is good in our heat, as potatoes that take too long often suffer from the heat, humidity, rain and insects of summer.

It will be interesting to see how potatoes do in future years as the soil improves.

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