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| Rooting up potatoes |
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| potato head |
Happy 2014! At Rumpty Doo we spent the first day of the year with the family Farrugia rooting up our potato patch on a drizzly South Gippsland day... and weren't we in for a surprise! After largely neglecting the poor paps (I think I may have watered them about twice) you can imagine our astonishment when we started to uncover some enormous specimens of
Solanum tuberosum. In fact, after weighing up each variety we found we had close to 40 kilos of potatoes from two small patches, with very little work! We're now entertaining fantasies of a career as potato farmers, or at least thinking we might try
saving seed this year, although we have had people warn us against such a technique as it can lead to the spread of disease.
We grew six heritage varieties - Royal Blue, Nicola, King Edward, Pink Eye, Kipfler & the flamboyantly named Mozart (which yielded far less than the other varieties so we're hoping it makes up for its low yield in excellent taste).
With such a bounty there was nothing more for us to do than crack out the peelers and start making a batch of gnocchi! We used our bumper crop of Royal Blue (weighing in at 9.9kg) and they made a pleasantly soft gnocchi. Their deep blue skin gives way to a creamy yellow flesh when peeled, so, sadly our gnocchi was not purple!
NB: When making gnocchi the Family Farrugia swear by
Stephanie Alexander's recipe.
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| Royal Blue |
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| gnocchi chop |
Happy 2014! At Rumpty Doo we spent the first day of the year with the family Farrugia rooting up our potato patch on a drizzly South Gippsland day... and weren't we in for a surprise! After largely neglecting the poor paps (I think I may have watered them about twice) you can imagine our astonishment when we started to uncover some enormous specimens of Solanum tuberosum. In fact, after weighing up each variety we found we had close to 40 kilos of potatoes from two small patches, with very little work! We're now entertaining fantasies of a career as potato farmers, or at least thinking we might try saving seed this year, although we have had people warn us against such a technique as it can lead to the spread of disease.
