Harvesting Potatoes with my Boys

From the day we plant our seed potatoes (around mid February each year), we eagerly anticipate the day that we harvest them.  We watch them as they grow, noting when they bloom and then when the plant itself starts dying back, letting you know it is time to get the shovel and call the potato digging crew.  Harvesting potatoes is a fun job.  It is kind of like digging for buried treasure.  Since potatoes grow beneath the soil, you never know what you have until you put the shovel in the ground and turn the soil over.

The potato plants were the biggest and healthiest that they've ever been this year and I attribute that to the composted chicken litter that a friend gave me.  I incorporated that into the garden and it really grew some beautiful plants.  But as stated earlier, the success of a potato crop lies below the ground.  Let's see what we've got:

Pay dirt!!!

The first shovel unearthed a nice bounty of beautiful potatoes of all different shapes and sizes.  My job is to dig them and Russ and Benjamin are spotters.  As I turn the soil over, they look for potatoes and throw them into a crate.  These new potatoes are just the perfect size.  After just a few hills were dug, we knew that it was going to be a nice harvest.

Varied sizes of new potatoes

I planted mostly red potatoes, but also planted a few Yukon Gold potatoes for variety. The red potatoes proved to be the better producers this year as they have in previous years.  The soil was so rich and easy to turn over, thanks to the compost and organic matter.  With each passing year, you can see visible results that the soil is getting better and better.  This guy gives evidence to the health of the soil:

Earthworms & Healthy Soil

Here is a photo of the process, we me digging and Benjamin and Russ gathering the potatoes into a bucket. Crocs and socks aren't exactly fashionable, I know, but when you are digging potatoes, you really aren't trying to impress anyone!

You've got to be real careful not to cut the potatoes in half when you're digging.  I messed up on a few and we'll eat those right away.  Sometimes you have to turn the soil over several times to make sure that you don't leave any potatoes in the ground. If you do, it is not a real big deal.  The potatoes left in the ground will re-sprout and grow new potatoes for you.

Digging as much as we can before the sun goes down

Tricia took a picture of us when we were done for the afternoon.  In all we had to break up the harvest into 3 separate days as the daylight ran out on us each afternoon after work.  Even ol' Big Boy came and joined us for the picture.

The Potato Harvesters

There was no Potato Famine at Our Maker's Acres Family Farm this year.  Our harvest was bountiful, thank the Good Lord!  In fact last night I posted about our harvest of Italian Roma Beans and I mentioned that we'd couple those beans with some of our harvest from the blog post tonight with what might be the world's most perfect side dish.  And here it is - Italian Roma Green Beans steamed in butter with fresh-dug new potatoes!

Talk about good!

Rice & Gravy with smothered steak and fresh green beans and side of new potatoes is a meal fit for a king, I tell ya!

Mmmmmm!

At the end of the day, we had a good time uncovering some nice potatoes from 4 1/2 rows.  The boys enjoy harvesting them and so do I.  Now the potato patch looks so barren, so empty, and it is, but I'll add some composted chicken litter that I just removed from beneath the roosts in the chicken coop and we'll plant some more beans in this very spot.  It won't be barren for long.

Ready for a new crop to be sown...

Tomorrow I'll show you our entire harvest of potatoes.  Well, at least those that we haven't devoured yet. We learned last year that if you don't wash the potatoes and you store them in a dark place in a crate like a milk crate that allows for air flow, potatoes will last for a long, long time.