Fall colors peaked a few days ago.

Aspens along our driveway are brilliant yellow.

Snow creeps down the mountains as daytime temps rise only into the 50s. The final harvests begin.

Yesterday, we dug potatoes.

Mike digging potatoes in the difficult-to-reach “overflow” bed.

I planted potato bits in 1.5 beds in the main garden, stuck a bunch in what I call the “overflow” bed (which in my mind has become essential), and tossed the remaining in the compost (for compostatoes). Harvesting from the main beds and compost heap is fairly easy, but the overflow bed is a bit unwieldy. The lack of delineated boxes or rows and my penchant for using every available bit of space means that eventually you have to get right in there with the potatoes. Mike wasn’t here when I did this last year, so I let him have most of the fun this year.

Our colorful potatoes.

We harvested what we guesstimate to be about 80 pounds of red, white, and purple Magic Molly potatoes. No doubt thanks to soil testing and nutrient additions, we have about twice as many potatoes as last year, and we’ve given some away and eaten more this summer than we usually do. Best of all, we have few teeny-tiny ones and a good many big ones.

We’ve never grown potatoes this big!

I’m not sure our usual storage space will accommodate this many potatoes, but we’ll figure something out.

Yum!

For instance, we’ll start eating. We polished off most of the little ones in one meal. Got any interesting potato recipes?

We’re too late for the Alaska State Fair, but this is our Grand Champion Potato for 2014.

A potato conglomerate.

Yep, that’s a single unit. We even washed it to make sure it wasn’t held together by dirt. Cool, eh?