Putting the finishing touches on the 2014 Potato Harvest

It took us three afternoons to dig up all of our potatoes.  It was hard, but rewarding work.  We learned a few years ago that potatoes will last for a long time if you DON'T wash them.  So we brought them inside and weighed them.  We were amazed to see that our total harvest on 4 1/2 rows  weighed in at a whopping 107 pounds!

2014 Potato Harvest

So the next thing that we did was put them into milk crate type storage containers so that there is plenty of air flow.  We'll put them into a dark pantry and pull them out as we need them.  To give a little perspective, Russ (who is 5' 9") laid down by the harvest baskets.

We went through all 107 pounds of potatoes, sorting them out by sizes.  I'm sure there is some tool that does this mechanically, but we just do it by hand.  In the first container we put all the really small potatoes, including those from the size of a marble to the size of a large olive.  We'll eat these first.

Extra small potatoes

The next size sort are those that I call "Crawfish Potatoes," since these are the size potatoes you often see used in crawfish boils.  These potatoes are about the size of a ping pong ball.  These are a nice size for cooking with fresh green beans.

"Crawfish Potatoes"

The next size that we sorted were the medium sized potatoes that ranged from the size of a golf ball to the size of a tennis ball.  We like to take these size potatoes and cut them in half.  We then toss them in butter and fresh rosemary and then roast them in the oven.

Medium Potatoes

Finally we have the large potatoes that included anything larger than a tennis ball. These we'll shred up for making hash browns or use to make potato salad or other baking needs.

Large potatoes

And that closes out the 2014 Potato crop.  We generally try to plant them each year on February 14th. We'll make these last as long as we can.

SPUDS!

We'll also save some of them to use as seed potatoes for next year.  The half row of potatoes this year included seed potatoes that we saved from the previous year.  That was the first year that we've been successful in saving seed potatoes, so that was a positive.  SPUDS!  I was wondering how potatoes came to be known as spuds and in THIS LINK I learned that a spud was a sharp-bladed tool used to dig up potatoes and people nicknamed the potato after the implement used to dig it.  The nickname caught for some strange reason.  Regardless if you call them spuds or potatoes, they make a nice meal!