I've been watching the weather for the last few weeks waiting for the first frosts. We've enjoyed a lovely warm Fall this year. Except for a chilly weekend in mid-September temperatures have been very mild and my root veggies have been happy resting in the ground. The forecast for last night looked ripe for a good frost though so I decided it was time to dig up my potatoes.

It's a bit of a surprise. I don't know until I start digging how many potatoes I'll have. They are not like the carrots and beets where you can count tops and know roughly what you've got (the carrots and beets are still in the ground by the way - they'll stay there until we've had a couple of nice frosts to sweeten them up). I love pulling out the dead plants and shaking off the roots and seeing the bright red lumps that will be our food this winter. And then I dig around in the soil and pull out potatoes of all sorts of sizes and just when I think I've got them all another one peeks out at me. By the time I was finished this year I had filled my bucket.

Can you see the carrot in that picture? I didn't put that there. There was a second one top of the soil with a few teeth marks in it but this one was buried (also with teeth marks in it). Since there have never been carrots in this box I figure they must have been left by our resident squirrel. The mental image of a squirrel running around with a full size carrot in his mouth is making me giggle right now.

There were a few radishes that were never picked. They've bloomed in little pink and white flowers for the past month or so.