Potatoes

Here is a video highlight from our day of potato planting.
Farmer Hubby rigged our new cultivator to cover them and WOW did it make it so much nicer then last year! Over 1300 feet in today, with about that much still to do would be hard without equipment to help, as it was it was a full day process, to hill, apply fertilizer, put the potatoes in and then cover them.

(This is the first time I tryed uploading video from my cell!)

Potatoes...

Today we ordered our seed potatoes for next year.

It really makes the season seem like it is coming fast to be starting seeds and ordering major items like hundreds of pounds of potatoes. With luck (and good management) we should have a yield of a more then a couple tons, and that is a lot of potatoes.

It is also strange to be ordering items in quantities like hundreds of pounds, but 500 pounds of seed spuds is what we will be planting this year.

But to keep that in context it still costs less for 500 pounds of seed potatoes then one ounce of the cheery tomato seed we will be planting this year. Thankfully, we only have to buy 25o seeds, at about 10 cents a seed.

Rain! and Bugs...

Two inches of rain and EVERYTHING is greener the very next day...

Hubby farmer found 4 potato beetles today! I so HATE these horrid little things. By this time last year they had munched through most of our plants. To date this year we have less then 10 adults (7 I think) and maybe a hundred or so little larval slugs.

The picture I stole from Tiny Farm blog. The picture is of them on eggplant, but they do the same damage to potatoes if uncontrolled. So HOW do you control them? We have a handful of methods. First step of the year is to just squash them, they pop an other worldly color of orange, and scout for eggs which you remove. When there are to many for that you whack them off the plants and into either a bucket of water or onto the ground (at which time we flame them.) In the mean time we can spray them with Surround, which a natural clay (actually used as a food additive.) It turns the plants white which confuses them and the bugs the bugs, they hate the feel of it. When all that fails we have bigger organic guns we can turn to, although I really hope we can avoid it...

But our 1/4 acre of spuds are looking great...

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...