Tall Tales

An Idaho Tall Tale 

retold by

S. E. Schlosser

We here in Idaho are right proud of our potatoes. Our fields are so chock full of potatoes that you can hear them grumbling when you stick your ear on the ground. "Roll over, yer crowding me," they say.

Potatoes grow bigger in Idaho than anywhere else. Once, a greenhorn asked me for a hundred pounds of potato. I set him straight real fast. I don't believe in cutting into one of my potatoes. "You buy the whole potato, or you take your business elsewhere," I told him.

Why do our potatoes grow so big? Well, its because we feed them like family. Corn meal and milk every day for breakfast, lunch and dinner. You should taste my wife's mashed potatoes! They are the creamiest mash potatoes in the whole United States. Its all the milk our potatoes drink while their growing. Makes them so creamy that all my wife needs to do is just boil them and mash them up.

Sometimes, the size of our potatoes creates a problem for the farmers. One fellow I know got trapped for eight hours beneath a potato. His wife came looking for him when he was late to dinner. She had to get the neighbors to help roll it off. But that's just they way it goes when you're farming potatoes in Idaho.