The Yukon Golds and Red Clouds made a few nice big spuds but didn't produce a lot of tonnage for some reason. But the Carolas -- a delicious creamy yellow variety -- sure are hitting big! That book carton has just one section of a bed's worth, with lots more left to dig tomorrow. Tomorrow I'll also be digging the All Blues and the Buttes (a great Russet) that were very heavy producers for us last year.
In other garden news, we also bought Crazy Neighbor an electric leaf "blower" -- not because she plans to be one of the idiots who stands around using electricity to blow leaves around instead of just picking up a rake, but so that she can use the blower in vacuum/mulcher mode. This thing uses a heavy-duty metal fan that shreds leaves and twigs into fragments and dumps them into a big bag about the size of a king-sized pillow case. The stuff inside is PERFECT for winter mulch on garden beds.
Crazy Neighbor has several gigantic, decidedly deciduous trees and not too much garden use for the leaves. LOVESalem HQ, on the other hand, has only dwarf fruit trees and but many garden beds. Ergo, a symbiotic pairing -- we buy the leaf mulcher/bagger, she does the leaf cleanup on her yard and, instead of having to deal with bagging them and getting someone to take them to the leaf haul day, she shares the treasure with us.
(I have read in several places that leaf mulch is like compost Viagra because trees have those ginormous root systems that pull up nutrients from way way deep and away from the surface, giving you the "good stuff" so often washed through the top few inches of soil in our heavy rain climate).
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