Potato Sprouts

A sudden spate of summer weather has meant less interest in potato eating around here, and some of our recent specimens have gotten a little bit sprouty.

It's also gardening weather, of course, so we decided to try planting the potatoes in a trash can. Potatoes are not exactly roots, but instead grow from the stems of potato plants, so the basic principle is to bury the sprouting potatoes in a few inches of dirt in the bottom of an old trash can, and then, as the plants grow up, keep adding dirt or compost to keep the stems buried. When the can is full and/or you're ready to harvest, you dump the contents of the can and pick out the potatoes. Hopefully, you have more than you started with.

(This generally won't work with supermarket potatoes, which are treated to impede sprouting.)

(I also loved Boston Localvores's recent-ish tribute to their own sprouting vegetables.)