Almost time for Potato Planting

We usually try to plant our seed potatoes around Valentine's Day.  No particular reason, although I guess you could say we LOVE new potatoes cooked with some fresh green beans.  While at Parsley's (our local feed store in town), Tricia purchased some seed potatoes.  Most of them are red potatoes, but she also put a few white potatoes in the box for good measure.  I kept them in the utility room for a few days and allowed the 'eyes' to sprout a little bit.  You can see a few sprouts on the potatoes in the box below.

Seed 'Taters we purchased at Parsley's Feed Store

To add to those seed potatoes, we actually had the contents of the box below that are the remnants of the 2013 potato crop that were too small for eating.  They are all sprouted and we will put this in the ground as well.  If you look at the bigger red potato in the crate below that has the big, fat sprouts on it, Tricia found this one in a strange place.  The other day she went to put on a pair of my ropers (boots) and felt something in the toe.  She quickly pulled her foot out and reached in and pulled out this potato.  That potato is a survivor and didn't get eaten.  I'm figuring it will make some nice potatoes for us this year.

Seed potatoes from last year's crop

Last night Benjamin wanted to wrestle, but before we wrestled we had to cut up our seed potatoes.  I wanted to teach him how it's done.  He's helped me plant them before, but never cut them up.  Sometimes I want to do everything, but I need to step back and teach him how to do different things so he'll build up different skills.  Many times it is easier and quicker to do things yourself, but by doing that, you rob the next generation of knowledge.  In the old days kids apprenticed or learned a trade from their father, but too many times these days we make things easy on them by doing things for them instead and it comes back to bite them in the backside when they don't know 'diddly squat' about much anything.

The reason that you want to cut up potatoes is that one potato can give you numerous potato plants.  Every eye will yield a new plant, so you can cut off chunks of the potato that have an eye, being real careful not to damage the sprouted eye. Here you can see that Benjamin is slicing the potato right between two sprouted eyes.

Cutting up seed potatoes

It's usually best to flip the potato over before you make your cut to make sure that you aren't cutting off a sprout.  Sometimes you can get four or five different cuts out of one seed potato.

Slicing and dicing

In the end, we have a nice box of cut seed potatoes and Benjamin learned a new skill that maybe he'll show his son one day.  We'll put these aside for a few days so that the cut pieces have a chance to "scab" over. I've heard that if you plant them immediately, it heightens the chance that the potato will rot in the ground before it has an opportunity to grow.

We're looking at the beginnings of the 2014 crop

I think that cutting up seed potatoes is a good lesson for us.  Many times you'll hear farmers and gardeners say, "Don't eat your seed."  See, these potatoes would've made a nice meal, boiled and then mashed with some butter, a little garlic maybe, with a sprinkling of grated cheddar cheese and green onions on top.  But cutting up perfectly fine potatoes for seed is an exercise in faith.  We're not going to eat our seed.  We are sacrificing enjoyment now for a greater reward later - delayed gratification, they call it.

Hopefully, this foregoing of benefit now will yield an abundant return when we harvest potatoes in May and see that this tray of seed potatoes has given us buckets and buckets of potatoes that we will be able to enjoy for months. We'll see in a few months if this was a worthwhile endeavor!