Digging Spuds in the Mud

With a week's worth of rain in the forecast, I figured it would be a good idea to dig up our potatoes.  No sense in letting them get this far and then have them all rot in the ground, right?  When we ran out of room in the garden, I put in a 45 foot bed in the side yard.  Why raise St. Augustine grass when you can raise something on that same ground that you can eat?  The soil, at first, was poor.  Hard and compacted.  Not an earthworm in sight.  Now, after several years of growing potatoes, purple hull peas, blackeyed peas, and squash while incorporating loads of organic matter, the ground is soft, teeming with earthworms and fertile.  The potatoes are mulched with chopped up live oak leaves to suppress weeds and maintain soil moisture.  Once the crop is harvested, I'll turn all the leaves under and prepare for the next crop.

Here is part of the bed I'm talking about.  You can see the potato plants along with a beautiful Lemon Queen Sunflower that grew up volunteer from last year.  No weeds - just potato plants and mulched oak leaves.

Behold the Lemon Queen Sunflower.  How beautiful!  Here is reason # 4532 of How I KNOW there is a God.  Look intently at the center of the sunflower.  Observe the symmetry, the design, the order of the seed head of the sunflower.  It is mesmerizing.  It is like spirals folding into one another.  Design like that doesn't happen by chance!  Just for fun, if I went out and through out seeds, what are the chances that I could create a design like the center of this sunflower?  Slim to none?  Zilch.  Nada.  Zero.  A design like this requires a designer.  Creation like this requires a creator.

I dug up all the potatoes in the lower part of the garden.  We had gotten a lot of rain last week and the thick layer of leaves kept the soil moist and muddy in most places. As I pulled the plants up with garden forks, I pulled up a nice, big crate of potatoes.  Some, however, had already begun to rot in the ground.  Most, fortunately, were good.

As I pulled up the plants to expose the potatoes, I raked the leaves back over the soil.  I wish I would've taken a photo of all the fat earthworms.  A few years ago, this ground was devoid of earthworms.  We harvested potatoes of all shapes and sizes.  Here is one that fits nicely in the palm of your hand - baseball-sized.

Here are a couple that are smaller.  I like to cut these in half or in quarters and cook in butter with fresh-picked green beans.  Perfect!

The key to preserving these potatoes where they won't immediately rot is to NOT WASH THEM.  Lay them out where there is good air flow and let them dry off.  Once dry, bring them inside in a dark location and they will last for a couple months.  I've even been able to keep a few for seed potatoes to plant again in early August.

It wasn't a bumper crop, but six pounds of seed potatoes made more than a ten-fold increase and that isn't counting the potatoes that rotted in the ground or the eight feet row that I still have to harvest.  After a bunch more rain today, I better get out there tomorrow after work and dig the rest of them up!