Harvesting Potatoes

The potato is one of the least interesting sections of any vegetable garden.  All season, you watch the green stalks leaf out, with no sign that anything is actually happening.  Tomatoes, beans, peppers, and the rest of the garden show off all summer..."look what I can do!"  But the potatoes just seem to take up space, and even worse, the greens need to die back to let you know the supds are ready.  Visitors to my garden always look at the potato patch in August dismissively and wonder what I planted there and what went wrong.  It's August 18th now, and those robust, green stalks have turned brown and fallen over.

But...harvesting potatoes is like digging for buried treasure!  My kids love it.  Nobody wants to help me weed, but they are all willing to pull on gloves when it's time to dig for the potatoes.  This year I planted three different varieties and tried three different methods.  Yukon Gold organic, Purple Majesty organic, and Colorado Rose organic all went into the garden in May right around the last frost.

In past years, I have had great success planting potatoes in pots.  It's easy to plant them without digging trenches, easy to remember where you planted them (in case weeds take over) and so easy to harvest; just dump the pot out and scoop up the spuds!

Last year most of my potato crop failed because the trenches I planted the potato seeds in contained way too much compact soil.  The results was a few tiny potatoes and nothing else.  This year, I amended the soil with a nice mix of compost and peat moss, and while I would not say I harvested a bumper crop, I do have 20 - 30 pounds of potatoes for my trouble.

The new method I tried this year was a chicken wire tower.  I have not harvested it yet, and I was not faithful to the method so I don't have high hopes.  You are supposed to continue to fill the tower with soil every time the green potato leaves poke through, thus creating a high tower of soil filled with potatoes by the end of the summer.  When it got hot, I got lazy.  But there's always next year.

Dinner tonight:  Organic, locally farm raised chicken with a thai lime basil (from the garden) marinade, salad, and mashed potatoes.