Saturday, September 01, 2012

Potato harvest

As we are coming to the end of the summer season, things are slowly disappearing from the garden. For example, my potato bed is empty by now, which makes for a really early season, considering that usually potatoes stay till at least September.

Look at these beauties I dug up couple days ago. We had 2 dinners out of this bowl and I dug up 2 more dinners couple weeks before that. 


I am pretty sure you can see that I made one huge mistake this year while I was setting these potatoes up in the garden. If not, I will give you a hint - notice their size. Many of them are too small. Apparently, you are suppose to pile a huge amount of soil around the the plants when they are just about 8-10 inches high. This will help the plant to form tubers deeper in the soil and the potatoes will have enough space to grow bigger. They like their space nice and deep, as much as possible. 

This is my potato bed with the spuds in the ground. This was the first year for this bed. I left the seed potatoes in a cool dry place for about 2 to 3 weeks and when the sprouts were about 2 inches long I planted them outside into the soil.


Here I took a picture of the plants way past their "pilling" period. I also read that you could cover them with hay, which will make it difficult for any ground traveling beetles to get to them. Something I will try next year as well.


This is how my potato bed looks today. You can start harvesting potatoes as soon as the plants start dying over. They will turn yellow brown and fall over. That is the right time to dig them up. You can dig up only few and leave the rest of them in, if you wish but don't wait too long because they might start sprouting again.


Good luck to you!


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