Potatoes

Well I ordered my potatoes the other day. Hopefully I have picked the correct time to have them shipped to me. I actually bumped it up by 3 weeks since the weather has been so odd the last couple of years. I don't want to plant them too late and hit the hottest driest spells while they are trying to make the most spuds for me. After much debate on where to order from I finally settled on Milky Ranch since they had a large selection that I could order from one place. They are the new owners of Ronniger's Potatoes.
I think we have decided to plant them in the many many leaves we received this year from the city that I blogged about. We probably received about....75 dump truck loads over all. About. Hard to tell for sure. They just kept on coming and coming so we don't really know. But we have a lot of leaves. I am still trying to decide if I might need to add a little bitty bit of lime to the leaves for the potatoes. I know that potatoes are better off with an acidic environment but they don't want to be super acidic. So how do you test leaves I am wondering? I might just have to play it by ear with that issue. I don't know if I will be neat and tidy and make all the leaves into rows to plant or if we will just go out there and start planting. Probably rows--much easier to keep track of what is where and keep varieties separated.
Anyways I ordered this year the following varieties:
all blue, all red (aka cranberry red), austrian crescent, blossom, caribe, french fingerling, german butterball, huckleberry, ndc4069-4 (only one pound of this one) and purple peruvian. Most of these are older potato varieties. Some of them are newer--does ndc4069-4 give itself away on that account? Some we have grown before and some we have not. Overall I bought 31 pounds of seed potatoes. How much will I get at the end of the season? Good question-- and an answer to it will be supplied at the end of the summer of 2007. When we harvest all of our bounty of potatoes we will store most, some will be canned for addition to quick soups on busy nights AND I also thought about drying some of them this time. Does anyone else dry their potatoes? I didn't know if I would like them that way---not that I have never had a processed meal that had them in it. I might try a small amount if I harvest enough potatoes. You never know if you will have a good harvest or not. We do have voles---so I imagine we will loose a few to them. (The dog and cat seem to keep them down pretty well though which is good.) Then of course you have this screwy weather we have all been having. I hope they do well.
I didn't order any russets, which I do like, because supposedly they don't do well here in Georgia. I don't know why they don't do well but I found that out when I was looking for new data on last frost dates. Most of which need to be updated terribly bad. Our last frost date hasn't been the middle to end of April since I can ever remember.

For an interesting little history on potatoes (and their use in powdered wigs many years ago) go Here.