Potatoes!

Last night we put in 50 pounds of seed potatoes - fingerings and heirlooms. Today we are expecting a UPS shipment of another 50 pounds of yukon golds. That may seem like a TON of potatoes, but the yield on them is not that high, and with all our members, saving some for the optional Thanksgiving and Christmas baskets they will go quick! This is our first year doing them on any scale so we are keeping it pretty small...

100 pounds of seed potatoes is 1,000 feet of potatoes. That is a lot of potatoes to manually hill, so we bought a potato plow. After we prep the soil we make hills, using our hill maker. Then we run the potato plow down the middle, which makes a trench in the hill. By doing this we do not have to manually dig almost 1000 holes with a hoe! Talk about a time saver!

After we drop the seed potatoes, about every 12" in the rows, we go back with a hoe and cover the potatoes with about 2" of soil. We were worried that this would take forever, but with the soil still being light and dry it was a pretty quick job! As the potatoes grow we will continue to hill more soil on top, until they are at least 6" deep. Once they are fully hilled and growing well we hope to mulch them with straw...

Then comes the fun part! Picking... One of the things that has stopped us from growing them on a large scale before is the thought of having to manually, with a pitch fork turn over hundreds of

feet of row to find the potatoes hidden beneath! That brings us to our newest piece of equipment... This potato picker. It is an older model and not one of the high tech ones that puts the spuds in a bin (those run multiple thousands to tens of thousands of dollars) but it will do the job! And we found it on eBay and got a bit of a deal on it... It runs along under the row and pulls up anything it hits, kind of shakes some of the dirt off (that's what the fingers do) and then drops the potatoes onto the ground, where all we have to do is pick them up! We are hoping it will also work on the sweet potatoes, another experiment, we have a couple hundred plants coming in the next couple weeks...

It still amazes me how much equipment there is to buy when you decide to farm. That is if you want to avoid undue (and unnecessary) amounts of manual labor...