Harvesting the LaSoda Potatoes

Somewhere around February 9th we planted 15 pounds of LaSoda seed potatoes in our garden in the side yard.  It is near the bee hives and you sort of have to be on guard around there.  Sometimes they are in a docile mood, and other times, they'll run you inside.  Remember the 15 pounds we planted.  That will be an important point of reference a little later in this post.

This is the patch that I've been busy amending the soil with plenty of compost and mulching it each year with wood chip mulch.  Over the year the mulch disintegrates and becomes part of the soil.  This area that had once been rock hard with not an earthworm in sight is loose and easy to use digging forks to turn the soil over at the base of the potato plants to harvest.  I usually wait until the plant is mostly dead to harvest.  The plants look mostly dead, don't they?

I took soil samples at the end of last year.  The potatoes last year seemed to grow nicely at first and then the leaves slightly yellowed and didn't grow lush and green to their full potential.  I wanted to find out what the problem was.  The soil test showed that everything looked good, except for sulfur.  The soil is lacking in sulfur and potatoes need sulfur.  So, this year I added sulfur to the soil prior to planting.

Here is a photo of the entire patch harvested.

When the dust settled, literally, here's what we had:

It's a nice haul of Irish potatoes and we're going to eat every dadgum one of them, but I'm disappointed in the yield.  I knew something was wrong right off.  Some plants only yielded one potato.  Most had two.  Some gave us 3.  Essentially, we had the same problem.  The plants all germinated.  Every single one of them.  They grew and then turned a yellowish color and never grew vigorously.  The didn't get overly wet or dry.  The soil test showed everything looked good.

I wheeled our Gorilla Cart to the back patio and let the potatoes kind of dry off.  You never want to wash the potatoes until you're ready to cook them.  Otherwise you diminish their shelf life.

I loaded them in a crate where I'll bring them inside and store them in a cool, dark, dry place.  Let's analyze the yield and talk about it.  As discussed earlier, we planted 15 pounds.  We weighed what we dug up and you can see the total production below.  42 pounds of LaSoda potatoes were pulled from the earth.  We almost tripled what we planted.  Not terrible, but I expected much more.

I looked up to see what the potential yield should be for LaSoda potatoes.  The publication told me that you multiply the weight of the potatoes planted by a factor of 10.  That's how you estimate a good yield in our neck of the woods.  So, we planted 15 pounds.  We should expect approximately 150 pounds of potatoes harvested.  And we got 42 pounds.  Disappointing!

It was definitely a better harvest than last year, but nothing to write home about.  I'll be trying to figure out what we're missing and why they aren't producing like they should,  and what the soil needs.  Don't get me wrong, we'll eat them all, but I am compelled to find out why the potatoes aren't producing more.  There's something missing.