Hi - when we were getting ready for Y2K I bought about 1000 lbs of lovely huge russet potatoes cheap. We've eaten about 500 lbs of them, but the rest are growing huge spikey pink roots and getting mushy and don't taste so good. I don't want to use them for seed potatoes, unless you can tell me it's all right, since here in idaho we've had a problem with blights in stored potatoes.

So - how can I use all these potatoes? Feed them to the chickens? Don't have hogs and sheep aren't interested. Compost them? Any suggestions or information will be gratefully accepted!

-- Ann Zavala (AnnZavala@Yahoo.com), April 17, 2000

Answers

Here's some ideas - though I have never tried to get rid of 500 lbs of potatoes.

Didn't compost them directly. If you just put them into the compost pile, then in the future when you spread the compost on your garden you will spread the diseases.

Put them in a big pot and boil them, to kill the diseases, then compost.

Feed them to to chickens, how many birds do you have? 500 lbs is a lot of feed.

Build a still and make alcohol to run in gas engines around the farm. Don't even think about selling though, or the BATF will be at your door.

Last year during the drought I had deer coming into my garden, dug up and ate my spuds. Dump the at the far end of a field near a stand of treees for the deer, opossum and skunks to eat, black bear will eat them too.

Find some one with hogs, they love them.

Have you tried using potatoes in bread and donuts, the yeast will fed on the potato starch, generally taste great.

Good Luck,

-- Rich (pntbeldyk@wirefire.com), April 18, 2000.

Have you tried cooking them before you feed them to the sheep? That might make a difference. But don't try to feed a lot at once, or they'll get sick, just like they would on an overdose of any new food. My friend in Alaska who has a lot of dogs cooks dogfood in half of a fifty-gallon drum over an open fire -- you could do that if you didn't want to cook them in the house. Also, it might be a good idea to cut out the sprouts first. Potatoes are in the nightshade family, and the green parts aren't healthy to eat -- also don't taste good.

-- Kathleen Sanderson (stonycft@worldpath.net), April 18, 2000.

How about planting them, for this year's crop?

-- Leann Banta (thelionandlamb@hotmail.com), April 21, 2000.