Digging up Potatoes – 2016

Back on February 13^th 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!