Back on February 13th we planted potatoes in
our garden. We like to plant both the Lasoda Red as well as Yukon Gold varieties.
We purchase the seed potatoes at our local feed store, but we also plant
some of our own potatoes that we’ve saved over the course of the year in our
potato bin in which the eyes have sprouted long shoots and the potatoes
themselves are shriveled. They’re not
good for eating, of course, but they’ll grow more potatoes.
I’ll cut up the seed potatoes into chunks, each
containing a sprouted eye and allow them to ‘scab over’ for a couple of
days. I counted 168 individual seed potatoes. Then I simply put them in the
ground. This year we achieved 100%
germination on the potatoes. I mulched
them with live oak leaves to discourage weed competition and top dressed with
some chicken litter. The potatoes
flourished. I mean they really put on a
lot of vegetative growth, but the important growth is going on underneath the
soil.
My garden planner told me to be checking for maturity in
about 90 days. Unfortunately, we
experienced a good bit of rain in late April/early May and the potatoes that I
planted on the lower side of the garden turned yellow and sickly. To keep those potatoes from rotting in the
muddy ground, we dug those up about a week ago.
A few were rotten and when we picked them, they squished in our hands,
and were nasty smelling. Most were okay,
though.
Yesterday, I got my digging fork out and assembled my
potato digging crew to dig up the remainder of the potatoes that were planted
on the high sided of the garden. We
always like digging potatoes. It’s like
digging for buried treasure. We started
on one end of the row and I would turn over the soil and Russ, Benjamin and
Tricia would unearth the potatoes and throw them in a big blue tub.
Tater diggers |
The soil was rich and dark-colored, just teeming with
earthworms. We did run into some fire
ants that had invaded the garden. We
raced to dig them and pick them from the dirt before they could bite us, but we
weren’t very successful. Potatoes of all
different sizes were unearthed.
Unearthing buried treasure! |
We kept filling the bucket as we worked our way up and
down all the rows.
Filling the Bucket |
The red potatoes were by far the better producers in
terms of quantity, while the Yukon Gold potatoes, while they didn’t produce as
many, they produced potatoes of nicer size.
A nice Yukon Gold 'baker' |
When all was said and done, we
straightened up our aching backs and carried the tubs of potatoes back to the
house where we’ll put the potatoes into milk crates and store them in the dark
pantry.
Potato Harvest Results - Spring 2016 |
We’ve learned through
experience not to wash them and to keep them in a dark place and as cool as
possible. By following that practice,
we’ve been able to almost make our potato inventory last year
round. I’ll need to plant the Fall
potato crop a little earlier this year as the last ones were affected by the
freeze.
I weighed the full potato
harvest, minus a few that we ate fresh out of the ground cooked with some green
beans, and our Spring Potato crop yield totaled 144 pounds. We planted 10 pounds of red potatoes and
5 pounds of Yukon gold potatoes. So a total of 15 pounds of seed potatoes yielded about 150 pounds of potatoes. Looking at it another way, each pound of seed potatoes, on average, produces 10 pounds of potatoes to eat. As I mentioned earlier, we planted 168 "pieces" of seed potatoes that yielded 144 pounds of potatoes to eat, so that tells us that that each 'seed' or piece of potato planted will yield, on average 0.85 pounds of potatoes to eat.
That was great information to learn and
we’ll certainly enjoy eating the potatoes that we dug, but that doesn’t compare to the memories and
fun we had digging them up!
No comments:
Post a Comment