Totally shameless “Plug City Arizona” – earlier this year, I went, courtesy of the Broome County Cooperative Extension (ahem), on a bus trip to the Philadelphia Flower Show, where your Aunty goggled at all the orchids, was amazed at how big some people can grow various plants and bought a few things. I bought a rather nice basket and some horse radish roots (which I planted and which seemed to do absolutely NOTHING for a very long time but are now emerging) and I got a small bag of seed potatoes. Do not ask me what potatoes they were – I managed to lose the label from out of the bag. They were ‘German — something.” In any case, they were the first potatoes that I stuck into the ground this spring, as soon as the ground temperature warmed up and when they emerged, I took a picture, 
uploaded it to flickr.com and put the words “Philadelphia Flower Show” into the description. You now see the result – Schmap guides found it and as they would say, the rest is history.
The way to find it is to click, on the Schmap box, on the photo that accompanies their listing of the Philadelphia Flower Show and click through all the lovely photos in the slide show – my humble potato shot is toward the end. The rest of the photos are truly wonderful and give you a terrific overview of all the terrific exhibits and resources that are available at the show. I find it a little bit ironic that my rather utilitarian ‘tater shot’ is accompanied by all that beauty, but I guess that is what irony is all about, eh?
Potatoes are from the plant family Solanacea (pronounced Soh-lan-ay-seh-eee, for those that care), which is a pretty interesting family, all told. It also includes such dainties as tomatoes, egg plants, and deadly nightshade 
If you are (ahem) old enough to recall the Ed Sullivan Show, then if I mention the words “Italian acrobats with spinning plates”, you will know exactly what I’m talking about. For the less ‘elderly’ among Aunt Toby’s readers, suffice it to say that this family group had a hilarious act whereby they set up poles with plates spinning at the tops and they ran about the stage, back and forth, making sure the plates were spinning and not falling to smash on the floor. The big finale was their all picking up the poles and catching the plates. Voila!!
In our last episode of “Weird Veggies I Have Known and Learned to Love”, we talked kohlrabi; today it’s that ‘not quite celery – where’s the beet’ thing called Swiss Chard. Chard suffers from a branding problem – how good does it feel saying the word “chard”?
Gardener’s Blues
It has come to Aunt Toby’s attention that she has neglected the totality of the garden learning experience of some of her little friends. Far be it from me to avoid getting into the, ahem, nitty gritty, of gardening, that is to say “How do I know when I sow seeds, when something comes up — is it what I sowed or if it is a weed?”
Hope…and other things…spring eternal. I went out this morning to take the temperature in the garden beds and frankly, for all the warming up, the soil is no warmer than it was the last time I took it. And it’s actually very consistent around the beds in the garden also – not more than a couple tenths of a degree difference, which is a good thing. 
