And behold, they ate of them

A few weeks back I wrote about the way Mara seemed to be charmed when it came to windowsill propagation and backyard farming. In that post we made much of the fact that she had thrown a handful of wasted spuds into a patch of unamended soil — one might be excused for using the word “dirt”, normally anathema to plantsmen — covered them over and forgotten about them, and from this unfretful sowing came four large and verdant potato plants. True, it was I who remembered to toss a little water their way when the heat finally came in August, but I almost didn’t because I didn’t really think new potatoes were hatching under there. As you saw in the post, potatoes were indeed growing — Yukon Golds — and we gathered them up at summer’s end.

Mara enjoys the fruit of her labors. That's face paint on her cheeks, by the way (a different story).

I just wanted to report on the end of the story, at least for this year. Knowing that the way things go around here Mara’s spuds would have rotted in the garage — a sort of fitting circular journey since that’s where she found the original bag Angela had abandoned there — before we ever did anything with them, I suggested we bring them upstairs and whup ’em up! Mara and I washed them, I sliced the littler ones into home fry chunks and the two largest ones into French fries, and Angela baked the home fries up with some fish sticks the next night. (The French fries we’re saving for another occasion.) And let me just testify, these potatoes were delicious!

I’m so tickled about the way this all went down, I just had to take a photo. I don’t know, it just blows my mind that Mara did this. It seems like she was a baby a minute ago, and now she’s practically growing food by herself. To produce sustenance out of the earth is one of Ye Bigge Thynges, is it not? Okay, I’ll stop yapping about it now.