Yes, you can send a potato through the US mail

A while back, a friend mentioned to me that you could send potatoes through the mail. I was pretty skeptical at the time, but basic Internet research confirmed what they told me.

So a little bit later I had the opportunity to send them something, and decided to test it out. If I sent them a potato, and just a potato in the mail, would they get it? As a wannabe journalist/fact checker/Wikipedian, how could I not!

Yep.

I took a raw potato, washed it, and wrote a short message with a marker.

Then I printed out an address label (because the potato wasn't large enough for me to handwrite it) and struggled with sticking it on. Clear tape didn't work, and neither did packaging tape. Duct tape to the rescue!

I went to the post office by SJSU, and the clerk there said it would take 2 days to be delivered. They also said they had been asked to mail plenty of other "weird things", and a potato wasn't that unusual. I got a receipt so I could "track the status of my potato". And someone in line commented that I should also be sending along some sour cream :P

And then I waited, tracking online. Two, three, four days passed, and it hadn't been delivered. The recipient was in San Jose, so it just needed to head to the sorting center and then go out for delivery.

That was when I lost hope, and deemed the potato lost. Some things just sound too good to be true.

...except a week after it was supposed to be delivered, it showed up! I assume it got lost at some point, but USPS is 👌 and got it to its destination.

BuzzFeed conveniently has a list of 20 other things that we can supposedly mail. What's next?

P.S.: PHP still considers "a potato" to be a valid time. MediaWiki won't let you though.