AUUGH!! Mutant Potatos!

My wife bought a couple bags of potatos about 6 months ago and stuck them under the sink, where we promptly forgot about them. They were in 2 plastic bags, and the 2 plastic bags were inside of a paper grocery bag.

Well, yesterday evening, for some unknown reason, my wife remembered the potatos and I guess she was hoping they’d still be good for eatin’. (yuck) She pulled the grocery bag out from under the sink and immediately started screaming and freaking out! I looked in the bag and here is what I found:

There are pinkish/purplish stalks that look like a cross between trees and squid tentacles growing up out of the potatos. Now, I know what you are picturing and trust me this is WORSE. They are strong enough that most of them have poked out through the plastic bags and a few have even grown so tall that they are poking out the top of the grocery bag (about 18 inches!!!) There are little green spines in clusters along the stalks. Down near the potatos, inside the plastic bags, there is just a solid mass of tentacles. Now, there was no mold, or ooze, or anything “gross” in the normal sense of the word, it just looked like a very alien, and very large plant.

Now, here are my questions:

Has anyone else experienced anything remotely similar to this?

How does this happen with no water and no soil and no light?

How big could this thing get? What if I hadn’t found it for ten years? (It is currently out by the garbage, but it is probably still growing)

Oh yea, I’ve heard about this. If you had left the mutant veggies under there long enough they would have grown into these human sized pod things. Split them open and inside you would find a creature that looks kind of like you or your wife.

You should in no way feel frightened or upset by this. Bring the plants back inside. Soon you will know what it is to be one of us.

What is this, some kind of freakout??

Um, okay, that was amusing. Now here’s the Straight Dope.
Geez, Dill, how old are you? I mean, how long have you been walking around on this planet, and you never noticed before that if you leave potatoes out too long, they sprout? That’s what those “tentacles” are, babe, just Mother Nature doing her darndedst to propagate the potato species.

It must be fairly chilly under your sink, otherwise when you opened the bag you’d have had “rotten potato city” instead of sprouts. A smell never to be forgotten.

BTW, the potato growers treat the spuds with growth inhibitors, which however only last so long.

(The eyes on a potato are what sprout. When you’re making seed potatoes to plant in the garden, you need to make sure each chunk has at least one or two eyes. You’re not supposed to eat them, they’re supposed to be poisonous.)


“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen

Also, BTW, don’t bother trying to eat the sprouted potatoes. The flesh itself isn’t toxic, but the spuds have used up all their good carbohydrate energy to make those sprouts. See how weird and wrinkled and watery the potatoes themselves are? That’s 'cause there’s basically nothing left to eat. Throw them away.

That’s what root vegetables do, is store energy in the root to make more leaves and flowers next year. Carrots do this too, all those weird white whiskers are roots for next year.

Onions ditto. Green stuff coming out the top? Left it in the bin too long, onion thinks it’s time to get a move on and obey its DNA.


“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen

A fun experiment: take one of those sprouted potatoes, plan it in a pot, and water it. Voilà, a miniature potato plant.

A few years ago my parents gave me an onion
that had sprouted in their kitchen. The sprouts were basically like the long ends of scallions. I took it home and my wife planted it. For the better part of a year
this onion kept sprouting these “scallions”,
which finally bloomed into a small green flower that smelled like…yes you guessed it…an onion. But the sprouts themselves
had a wonderful flavor better than any supermarket chive.

I’ve been walking around this planet for about 23 years now and this is my first experiment with spontaneously sprouting potatos. I’m not a farmer, or a chef. So sue me. If it had just been little sprouts, no biggie, but we’re talking 18 inches of pure ugly here!

Experience not experiment

D’oh!

Don’t feel bad dill, I know exactly what you’re talking about. A few years ago I left some potatoes in my cupboard for about a year. The reason I left them there so long was that after I realized they were growing, it took me months to work up the courage to get them out. Those things were scary!

PeeQueue

A year?! How big were they?

Trion:

I never do this, but… splort

That was among the funniest things I’ve read here in ages! My belly hurts! Keep up the good work!


Yer pal,
Satan

http://www.raleighmusic.com/board/Images/devil.gif

I HAVE BEEN SMOKE-FREE FOR:
Two weeks, three days, 20 hours, 7 minutes and 55 seconds.
713 cigarettes not smoked, saving $89.19.
Life saved: 2 days, 11 hours, 25 minutes.

Sorry, Dill, I was just expressing my astonishment. Here at God’s Little 1/16th Acre, we’ve been waging an ongoing battle of wills for years between us and potatoes. We want them to linger longer before they go ballistic; they want to reach for the sky before they’re barely out of the grocery bag.


“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen

Satan - Thank you. I’ll be here all week.


What is this, some kind of freakout??

To all those who did not realize that potatoes spontaneously sprout:

Sue your elementary school.

It is mandatory that every school kid stick toothpicks in a wedge of potato and put it on top of a glass of water and watch it sprout and grow roots. If you’ve never done this, you were cheated out of a proper education.

Peace.

This last Christmas when I got my traditionally grandparent given potato, I put it on a shelf and forgot it there.

When I found it about a month ago that thing had sprouts so damn scary I didn’t even want to go near it, let alone pick it up.

I don’t know what it is about those things. I’ve had to cut them off potatos since I was little, but when they start lifting the lid of a box up or poking holes in a bag, I just want to run away.


“Mega the Roo - Patron Saint of Marsupials and Shampoo”
-Ms Riddles

I worked in produce in a grocery store for several years. Every now and then, we’d have cause to move the major equipment around. It was inevitable that behind some large refrigerator case or wooden display we’d find dropped produce that had been sitting for months if not years. Potatoes were always a favorite, not just for the lengthy sproutings, but for how the potato itself would have shriveled over time. Sometimes the mutant vegetable ended up on the desk of a new employee–guaranteed to bring shrieks when found. I remember once several scary potatoes and onions ended up at the door of our competition–because hey, supermarket wars are very real.

The best thing we ever found was a bunch of bananas, which instead of going bad in the traditional way, had dried up black and shrunk so they looked like a little alien hand. They were hard–and I wish I had saved them for Halloween.

Sometimes, especially going inside the refrigerated cases to clean, we’d find things no one could identify. It would be a game among the employees–to see who could come up with the likliest vegetable to match the bizarre thing we had dug from the sludge deep inside the box.

If you want to have fun with your food, don’t eat it, leave it lying around for a while!

dill–instead of reacting in fear, you should realize that you may have the solution to your future potato supplies. Just cut up the tater into section, with one sprout per section. Plant the sections in your backyard garden. Voila! Potato garden.