Digging Potatoes With Benjamin

After WAY too much rain, looking at the sickly yellow potato plants made me decide to go ahead and dig them up, as I was concerned that they would rot in the wet ground.  Benjamin got his shovel and a crate and we went out to where I have a 45 foot row of potatoes planted.  Back in February, we planted them and now is the time that we normally dig them up.

We started in the new beds that are in the yard.  It is new land that I've been incorporating lots of organic matter like chopped up leaves and hay.  It is in a higher location than in the garden and that was beneficial this year due to all the rain. We didn't need the shovel after all.  The ground was wet and pulling the plant uprooted most of the potatoes out of the moist ground.  The spuds that didn't come up with the plant were easily found with our hands.

Uprooting Potato Plants to expose the Pomme de Terre

The potatoes were of various sizes, but the yield wasn't near what we produced last year. I attribute lots of that to all the rain.  There were tiny, undeveloped potatoes on many of the plants that never developed due to (I think) the yellowed, sickly plants brought on by an overabundance of rainfall.

Nice Potatoes

One bad thing about our potato harvest was fire ants.  The rain caused fire ants from far and wide to congregate on the highest place on the property - the hilled up row of potatoes.  As we dug, we had to quickly pick them up and put them in the crate and then slap our hands to remove the biting fire ants. Benjamin and I both had numerous bites.

One positive thing was that there were other creatures besides fire ants in the soil - earthworms.  That tells me that our incorporation of organic matter amendments are doing a great job in bettering the soil.  Did I say earthworms?  I meant to say enormous, gigantic, monstrous, mammoth, gargantuan earthworms.  The biggest I've ever seen.

Huge earthworm

Benjamin picked up one of them to show you.  I am not exaggerating when I tell you that this earthworm was a foot long!  We put him back in the potato bed to continue his work in the soil.

Enormous!

This was the biggest potato that we dug up out of the ground.  It is a nice sized spud.  I particularly like the smaller round ones that you cook whole along with some green beans and some bacon or tasso for flavoring.

When we were finished digging the row, we had a nice crate full of potatoes. Nothing compared to last year's crop, but nothing to scoff at either.  I'll plant more this fall.  We learned that if you want to make the potatoes last, you don't wash them, so we'll dust them off a little and bring them inside and eat on them for a while.

Crate of potatoes

A couple days later, we dug up the four rows of potatoes that we had planted in the garden.  Since the garden was at a lower elevation than the long row in the yard, many of the potatoes had rotted in the ground.  When we put our hands in the soft soil (or mud), the potatoes were soft, mushy, and stunk. We ended up getting a 2 1/2 gallon bucket of smaller potatoes from those rows when all was said and done.  You can't really do much about the weather except complain about it.  I'll try to purchase some topsoil to build up the soil in the garden to avoid this happening in the future.  We'll enjoy the potatoes we did harvest.  That's for sure!