"They're so purple!"

It was quite the exciting evening here last night. We harvested the first of our own grown vegetables! I know we've had rhubarb and herbs, but this was something we'd planted and grown ourselves from scratch, no help from friends (the rhubarb crown was a gift from friends trying to cut down their ridiculously prolific plant), no sneaky growing from things started in pots at the garden centre (most of our herbs). This was all us!

What was it we harvested? The uber potato! Remember the two random plants we discovered growing manically when we got back from LA? The ones that we had no idea what they were? Well according to my parents they were potatoes, and needed "earthing up." So we bought two massive half barrel tubs and dutifully re-potted and earthed them up. I thought this would stop their manic growing, or at least slow it down. Oh no, they continued to take over their part of the garden. We had no idea whether we'd actually get potatoes, whether we'd earthed up in time, or if it would turn out to be just one immense potato that would one day burst out of the tub sci-fi style.

We've been looking at them for a while wanting to investigate whether we'd been successful. After having had gorgeous home grown potatoes whilst at my parents, and knowing we planted our before them we figured it must be about the right time to poke about and see what we'd managed.

So last night, with N home from work before seven for the first time in three weeks, and the cupboard looking a bit bare we decided it was time. Armed with the strength gained from a pint of Guinness N began the battle with the uber potato. He poked around in the soil and suddenly little purple potatoes started surfacing! It was so exciting. We'd grown those!

What was funny was that the huge plant clearly got a little too carried away producing leaves as the massive plant only produced six mini-potatoes. However, they were shiny perfectly purple potatoes and we were very proud indeed.

We carried them into the kitchen, scrubbed them and then boiled them to be served alongside a veg and bean stew. They were light and fluffy, almost buttery in flavour. I'm not massive on potatoes, but if they're are going to be like that bring them on! I want to plant more, right now.

It was so wonderful to eat something we'd grown ourselves, especially as the purple ones are an unusual variety and apparently quite hard to grow. I can't wait to see how they other plant did, and then to start seeing the results with our other veg (assuming the squirrels actually leave us something).

I'm totally hooked to this gardening malarkey now, bring on the next round of planting!