Tiny potatoes

[Nomada]

I've just dug up the first earlies and got a surprisingly good harvest of potatoes ranging in size from fist size to smaller ones that sit nicely in the palm of your hand. Glad I brought the trolley with me!

However, I was wondering about the tiny marble sized potatoes, of which I have a few. Should I just turn them into a tiny potato salad or could they be used as seed potatoes perhaps, although I imagine a marble sized potato might be too small, despite the fact that I've dug many volunteer potato plants out of the compost heap and got some decent handfuls of tatties from them......

What do you think?

[Cloud]

We just eat ours along with the rest. I doubt they would be viable as seed potatoes as they'd have too little 'energy' to support themselves til they got going proper.

If you have lots then potato salad sound good to me.

[jim]

Dear Nomanda,

Just wash and cook in any way you like. Plain boiled, deep fried or roast are all fine, chips, however, are just too tiny to be of any practical use,

Love and Peace
Jim

[Odsox]

I don't think they would be any good for seed potatoes whatever their size.
To keep potatoes until next year they need a good thick skin to stop them dehydrating ... or shrivelling up, and for that they need to be matured, and to do that they need leaving in the ground until at least September.
Nice thought though .. I boil mine up briefly and feed them to my chicken, they love them and nothing is wasted.

[Rosendula]

I put mine in a sieve and blast them with a hose pipe to clean them. I do that somewhere near a bit of garden that needs watering, so it's not too extravagant with water. Then I put them in a bag in the freezer and chuck them whole into casseroles and stews and things as and when required.

Or if the tiny ones are still attached to the plant, I replant it firmly, water it well and leave it a few weeks. You can sometimes get another meal like that.

[citizentwiglet]

Wow, I should have looked here first - I have just asked exactly the same question under 'Herbs and Vegetables'. Silly me...*slaps head*.

Glad you got a good crop Nomada, we did half of ours today and were most impressed!

[Nomada]

Sorry been gone an age, been writing an word essay about how hard sedges are to ID.....I turned them into tiny potato vegan tattie salad to take to a picnic today! They went down well. Went to the wildflower centre in Huyton Merseyside, it was beautiful and covered in bees, and it had a herb shop I'm now the proud owner of a lemon verbena bush

[citizentwiglet]

I flash-fried some of my teenies in a stir-fry; along with some chinese greens, my first dwarf beans (from the plants I thought were ailing - they are now producing like crazy, yay!), nasterium flowers and some chard stalks. It was lovely. My first meal produced almost entirely from my own labour (obviously excluding the noodles, LOL). It's a marvellous feeling.

Ahh, lemon verbena. Mine died, it has reminded me to procure another.

[Millymollymandy]

Glad you beans came good CT.

[citizentwiglet]

Thanks MMM......it was touch and go there for a while, and now you can barely see them for the madly trailing nasteriums but as long as I remember they are there we are picking from them pretty much every day at the moment. To be honest, I think I started them off a bit too soon, and they got a bit sun-and-wind battered; as the ones I sowed direct a few weeks later have caught up with the original six nicely, and are a much better colour.

[Millymollymandy]

That's often the case and why I advocate being patient in spring on this forum as I know from experience (at least here where I live!) that later sowings do better and grow faster and healthier than too early sowings.