Po-tay-to, po-tah-to

It's time to clean out the gardens and get ready for winter. Hilda did most of the work cleaning up the tomatoes. I helped her finish on Friday afternoon. Saturday we worked on the north garden. We got all the drip irrigation lines rolled up for storage. I cleaned out the peppers, beans, cantaloupe, and zucchini. I had big plans for continuing the work today, but after rolling up the landscape cloth from the potatoes yesterday, my back told me I’d better wait a bit before doing any more of that.
We did get two major chores done today. The rest of the potatoes are dug and the garlic is planted. We've been harvesting potatoes since July, and made a good dent in them while they were at their best. My experiment with planting whole sprouted potatoes from last year was a failure. The seed potato apparently rotted, and the rot spread to this year's tubers. Living and learning.
Here are some pictures from the potato harvest.

The potato harvest. Top row, left to right: Red Pontiac, Superior, Kennebec. Bottom row, L to R: Viking Red, Gold Rush Russet. For scale, my feet are off to the right, and the Kennebec are in a paper box.

Tiny and damaged potatoes for immediate use.
There are always some that get cut by the shovel.

The "dog head" potato

The "rubber ducky" potato. Or is it a chicken?

This is probably more potatoes than we can eat before they get all sprouty and wrinkly. As Terry often reminds me, potatoes are commercially available. I get into a mindset, though, where it doesn't occur to me that I can buy produce. Last winter, for example, it struck me as a new thought that I could buy lettuce. Imagine! A salad in February! I just get caught up seasonality. Not only do I not think about buying produce out of season, I get irritated when I see recipes for, say, asparagus and cherry tomatoes. Come on! Those two are NEVER available at the same time.
We have had as many as 4 eggs a day, still mostly brown. The Aracaunas are taking their sweet time at maturing. We have one green egg about every other day. When I get impatient, however, I remind myself that we will likely have more eggs than we can handle in the blink of an eye. We had the smallest egg yet a few days ago—0.8 oz. It was so cute!

Left to right: Grocery store large, teensy-weensy egg (0.8 oz), our usual pullet egg.

Hilda thought that I should have the teensy-weensy egg. She wondered if it was yolkless. When she was growing up, their young chickens sometimes laid eggs with no yolks. The egg had a yolk, but no yolk membrane! How odd.

Clockwise from top: Pullet egg, teensy-weensy egg with no yolk membrane, anemic grocery store large egg. The downside of blogging is that I overcook my eggs.