As always happens when I harvest potatoes, I think of this song.
This was all yesterday. I knew the piece of equipment that I needed to dig the potatoes but it had a bar mounted instead of the sweep it should have been so I texted dad about it. He was off helping set concrete so slow to get back to me. While I was waiting, I ran down to my field, picked up all the stuff, fencing, flags, plastic and set it off to the side. By then, dad texted me where the sweep was so I could get that all set.
I went and got all three rows (~150 feet each) busted and the video is here. That was right around noon and I went for lunch. This was an excellent idea on my part. We got a hard freeze the night before and it did freeze some of the shallower potatoes. The soil was still in chunks at the top when I went through with the middle buster. After lunch, I started picking up potatoes and since they had sat in the sun for a bit, all the potatoes that had frozen thawed just enough that they went mushy and it was very easy to tell which had frozen and could be tossed.
I had a mix of potatoes planted in two rows, leftovers from work. Somehow the potatoes that did the best in my neglectful conditions were the fingerlings, so now I have probably 1/4 fingerlings when there was two varieties out of 20 that went into the mix. All total, I ended up with two bushels of potatoes, which is not a great amount for the amount I put in except for the fact that they were free potatoes. All they cost me was planting, hilling and harvesting time. I did play a decent amount of the thrilling game of “potato or rock” which is a game you play when you plant blue potatoes.
(those are half bushel baskets so it is slightly less impressive than it looks)
Looks like I never posted about getting the garlic in the ground. To be fair, October was nuts. I ended up with 26 pounds of uncracked garlic so I planted out four rows in one bed at 6in x6in spacing and the bed was 200 feet long. One weekend I rototilled, planted and just raked some dirt over the blubs and spread straw the next weekend. I went deep on the rototilling so it was a nice bed to push the garlic into. I found it easier to plant and spread straw than to do black plastic mulch like I did last year. There might be a little more weeding needed but this wasn’t bad. I sold 150 of 170 heads that I grew last year with only the smallest ones not selling. We’ll be changing displays and things up next year so they will definitely sell. People were very excited about it.
