Saturday is Potato Planting Day

"The same boiling water that softens potatoes hardens eggs.  It's all about what you're made of not your circumstances." 

I am looking forward to the weekend.  One more day.  I have big plans on Saturday.  I'm going to put some potatoes in the ground.  I've already checked the weather.  It looks like it will be cloudy, but I should be able to plant.  While Tricia was at the feed store picking up some Dairy Ration for the cows, she purchased some seed potatoes for me.  These are the LaSoda variety.

A week before planting I always cut them up and let them "scab" over to keep them from rotting in the ground.

Some planting guides tell you that you can plant the potatoes whole.  You certainly can, but I like to cut the potatoes into chunks with each chunk having an eye.  Each eye will grow a potato plant.

The eyes have it!

But those aren't our only seed potatoes.  Check out what's in the bucket!

That is a wild looking sight!  What is it, you ask?  Those are some potatoes we grew in the Spring of 2018 and harvested in May.  We kept some small ones and rather than rotting, they sprouted.  Since May they've patiently waited to be put in the ground.  Saturday, their wait will be over.

Last year the feed store was out of La Soda potatoes.  These are Pontiac potatoes.  They'll do just fine.  I found that they didn't produce quite as much in yield as the La Sodas, but that's okay.  For these, I won't cut them up.  They are all shriveled up, but they have lots of sprouts and a real will to survive.

I read an inspiring story from HERE about an egg, a potato, and some coffee.  I'll post it here:

Once upon a time, a daughter complained to her father that her life was miserable and that she didn’t know how she was going to make it. She was tired of fighting and struggling all the time. It seemed just as one problem was solved, another one soon followed. Her father, a chef, took her to the kitchen. He filled three pots with water and placed each on a high fire.

Once the three pots began to boil, he placed potatoes in one pot, eggs in the second pot and ground coffee beans in the third pot. He then let them sit and boil, without saying a word to his daughter. The daughter moaned and impatiently waited, wondering what he was doing. After twenty minutes he turned off the burners. He took the potatoes out of the pot and placed them in a bowl. He pulled the eggs out and placed them in a bowl. He then ladled the coffee out and placed it in a cup.

Turning to her, he asked. “Daughter, what do you see?” “Potatoes, eggs and coffee,” she hastily replied.

“Look closer”, he said, “and touch the potatoes.” She did and noted that they were soft.

He then asked her to take an egg and break it. After pulling off the shell, she observed the hard-boiled egg.

Finally, he asked her to sip the coffee. Its rich aroma brought a smile to her face.

“Father, what does this mean?” she asked.

He then explained that the potatoes, the eggs and coffee beans had each faced the same adversity-the boiling water. However, each one reacted differently. The potato went in strong, hard and unrelenting, but in boiling water, it became soft and weak. The egg was fragile, with the thin outer shell protecting its liquid interior until it was put in the boiling water. Then the inside of the egg became hard. However, the ground coffee beans were unique. After they were exposed to the boiling water, they changed the water and created something new.

“Which one are you?” he asked his daughter. “When adversity knocks on your door, how do you respond? Are you a potato, an egg, or a coffee bean?”

Moral: In life, things happen around us, things happen to us, but the only thing that truly matters is how you choose to react to it and what you make out of it. Life is all about leaning, adopting and converting all the struggles that we experience into something positive.

Early Potatoes

Week before last (January 13th) I pulled out the smallest of the potatoes that we didn't eat from our spring crop that was harvested back in May 2017.  Tricia kept them in a dark place for a long time and then we moved them into a small fridge that we have so that they would last until potato planting time.  It is hard to imagine that they are still around!  The potatoes have incredible shoots growing out of them.  They are just itching to grow, so I granted their wish.  Normally we plant LaSoda variety of red potatoes, but back in the spring, the feed store was out of LaSoda and all they had was Pontiac potatoes.  They grew fine and yielded well.  I still thing the LaSoda is a better variety.

Seed Potatoes saved from the 2017 potato crop

I worked up several rows with a shovel and a hoe.  It was a beautiful afternoon and it felt good to do some manual labor.  As always I love the smell of opening up soil.  With some baling twine, stakes and a measuring tape, I marked out the 16 foot rows with 24 inch row width and an 18 inch wide walk space between rows.  Then I went to the hen house and harvested some composted chicken manure.  I dug a four inch trench down the middle of the row and sprinkled the chicken litter in the trench and then covered it.

I dug holes on either side of the trench with a big knife.  The holes were 4 inches deep.  As the potatoes grow, the roots will get their fertilizer in time to produce nice new potatoes for us.

I make sure to position the potato so that the shoot is growing upward and then I begin to cover the potato up with dirt.

I usually try to plant potatoes around Valentine's day, so these are a month early.  We'll see how they do, especially since they went through all that cold weather last week when we got into the upper-teens.  I do have a back-up plan.  I'll check the feed store to see if they have LaSoda seed potatoes.  If they do, I'll buy a few pounds of those and plant them in the garden around Valentine's Day as "insurance" in the event these saved seed potatoes don't pan out.

Digging Potatoes On a Perfect Day

This weekend the weather was absolutely perfect.  It was a nice time to get outdoors and get some things done that needed doing.  You know how that goes, right? Growing vegetables can be hit or miss.  Some years things grow great.  On other years, you can do everything the same and experience crop failure.  Sometimes it is pest pressure, Sometimes it is the weather.  Sometimes you don't have a clue!

After going through a week in which we saw AT LEAST 10 inches of rain, I was concerned about our potato crop.  I say "at least" 10 inches because my rain gauge topped out at 5 both days and I know rain splashed out of the top of the gauge. Potatoes don't take too kindly to sitting in the mud. They begin to rot and when you dig them up and try to grab them, they disintegrate in your hands, leaving a stinky goo behind.  Rotten potatoes don't smell too good.

I told Benjamin we had to get those potatoes out of the ground before they all rot, so we got my digging fork and teamed up to get the job done.  I would insert the fork into the ground about 5 inches away from the plant and pry upwards while Benjamin tugged gently on the potato plant.

If you work it just so, you can get to where you pull the entire plant and all the clinging potatoes out of the ground.  There will be potatoes of all sizes.  We eat them all.

Russ was at a Nascar race in Talladega so Benjamin and I attacked the potato rows with a vengeance, digging, grabbing, tossing the spuds into our garden wagon.  We, unfortunately, noticed quite a few potatoes that were either rotten or were soft or had white spots all over them - all results of too much rainfall.  I threw quite a few to the chickens.  Rotten, stinky potatoes don't seem to bother the chickens at all. They aren't picky and will eat them up and come running back for more.  When all was said and done, we had a nice haul of potatoes.

Benjamin posed by the garden wagon with the 2017 potato harvest.  I remember when I was young, we went on a family vacation to the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.  There was an exhibit about spy satellites that zoomed in in several photos from a view of the earth from space, to what appeared to be a city, to a man sitting on a park bench, to the headlines on the newspaper he was reading.  That seemed very intrusive to me.  Big brother watching, you know.

I thought I'd have a little fun with the next photographs and spy on our 2017 potato crop..

Benjamin and the Potato Crop

Zooming in, you can see that they are all red potatoes, Pontiac variety to be exact.

Zooming in closer to see the "headlines," you can determine that they are dirty and there are potatoes that are all different sizes.

I wheeled the wagon into the garage and removed the potatoes by bucket and weighed them on our kitchen scale. This is my summary from the harvest from LAST YEAR:

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 144pounds.  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.  

This year, once again, we planted 15 pounds of seed potatoes.  The only change being last year we planted the LaSoda and Yukon Gold varieties, whereas this year we planted 15 pounds of Pontiac seed potatoes.  You can see that last year we harvested 144 pounds.  This year, unbelievably, we harvested 143 pounds!!  I probably threw about a pound of rotten potatoes over the fence to the chickens, so our yield was right smack dab on the money compared to last year.  Pretty cool how that worked out.

I bagged up our onion crop that was curing and hung them from the ceiling in the garage to continue drying.  I did this to make room.  I placed all 143 pounds of potatoes on top of the frames I constructed with 2x4s and hardware cloth.  Many of the potatoes were marginal in terms of being on the verge of being soft and beginning to rot,  and I wanted to see if I could quickly dry them and save them. We learned NOT to wash potatoes during storage and you will lengthen the time that you can store the potatoes.

Some of these potatoes may inevitably go bad, but one thing's for certain.  If they begin to go bad, we'll smell them!

Prepping Seed Potatoes for the 2017 Crop

Tricia normally goes to the feed store every Friday morning to purchase Dairy Ration for the cows and goat, alfalfa, hen scratch, and the occasional bucket, rope or other item for the animals.  This past Friday, I sent her on a mission to come back with seed potatoes so that I could cut them and allow them to scab over so I could plant.  The mission was NOT accomplished.  The feed store was out of seed potatoes.  We had been beat to the punch.

Not to worry.  They proprietor had more seed potatoes on order and they would be in this week.  Tricia went back yesterday and picked up 15 pounds of seed potatoes. Looking at last year's crop that you can read about by clicking here, we will be hard-pressed to out-do the production of that crop.  The statistics in that post's second to last paragraph were very interesting to me.  Based on last year's figures, every pound of seed potatoes will produce 10 pounds of potatoes.

Here are 15 pounds of seed potatoes.  These should produce 150 pounds of potatoes if all goes according to plan.  Can you see the 'eyes' beginning to show themselves?

Last year we planted Lasoda Red Potatoes and Yukon Gold Potatoes.  I was really pleased with the Lasoda varieties' yield.  While the Yukon Gold variety didn't produce as well as the Lasoda, they stored really well.  I was looking forward to planting the La Soda variety again this year.  Well, wouldn't you know it, the Feed Store was unable to get their hands on any and instead, the variety they got was the Pontiac variety.  As the name suggests, they were developed in Michigan, while the La Soda variety was developed in Louisiana in 1948.  I guess we'll see how this northern cultivar grows down here.

The Pontiac had some nice eyes bulging.  I inspected each and they appeared to be in good shape with plenty of eyes.

Now you could plant each seed potato whole, but it wouldn't be very efficient.  I like to cut them up into chunks, ensuring that each chunk has at least one eye.  Each eye will grow a plant and each plant will produce some nice potatoes. So I grabbed a knife and started cutting.

Before too long I had two trays full of cut up seed potatoes.  But they are not quite ready for planting yet.

I like to leave them outside and let them scab over.  This allows the cut portion to heal and develop a hard protective layer.  I was taught by my grandpa to do this or you run the risk of the potatoes rotting in the ground.  I'll check them each day to see if the cut end has hardened and perhaps they'll be ready to plant this weekend.

As a little bonus, I do have some La Soda potatoes in the potato bin left over from last year's harvest in early May.  I'll plant them.  Even though they are small, they have long sprouts.  I think it will be interesting to plant the Pontiacs and some La Sodas and compare the yield.  It was great weather today. Hopefully the weather will hold as is through the weekend so that we can get them in the ground