Potato tally
As with all things garden this year – we were holding our breath and hoping for decent harvests. And with growing your own food, you always get some good with the bad. Many of my seed potatoes did not sprout, at all. I bought certified seed potatoes this year too. At first I thought voles had eaten the potatoes before they had a chance to sprout. Voles got a real toe hold, (or actually tooth hold) this year with all the wet. Voles hate disturbed soil, and no cover, and usually they retreat back to the pastures during the growing/tilling season. Not this year – they proliferated in the cover crops while we waited for the soil dry enough to till.
I discovered the dormant spuds while hilling, hooking with my hoe a perfectly solid seed potato with no sprouts whatsoever. Each row had a few of these. All the others grew like gangbusters. The voles came later. Wilting plants were my first clue. All told, the voles only ate 4 hills, and nibbled a few more. Not a fan of Irish potatoes, I guess. But all those little nibbles and non-sprouting spuds made a dent in my total yield.
I planted 40 pounds of potatoes and after all the sorting, culling and weighing today, I ended up with 377 pounds. Close to a 10:1 yield. Not quite as good as last year, but I am not complaining, considering the cool summer we had this year. Now I am hoping my squash do as well 🙂
Throwback at Trapper Creek 
Now that is a lot of potatoes. We didn’t have as many as last year either but we sure did have a good year for everything else!
Lisa, it’s amazing how many potatoes you can eat when you have an abundant supply!
I don’t know how many you usually get or need, but that sounds like a fantastic yield to me.
Have a great Wednesday!
Linda, this will be an OK amount for us – if I save seed back for next year, it will be just about enough or actually will have to be enough.
WOW! That is a lot of potatoes! And those are great looking ones!
Linda
http://coloradofarmlife.wordpress.com
Linda, the best part is how good they taste!
I can only dream of having so many potatoes!
Michelle, some day maybe right? It’s hard to beat a good potato.
We got about half that, from about the same amount of seed spuds. Also there were lots and lots of them about the size of a large cherry tomato. As these seem to be very flavorful, we’ve decided not to complain! But, yes, there were many non-sprouters.
risa, we had a few of those hills too, where the potatoes were all small. The one thing about this variety is they usually put on uniform size potatoes in each hill, either small, medium or large, and not usually mixed in the hill. I know that sounds funny coming from me, but when I want to peel a potato, I don’t want to mess with the little ones. We weighed some lunkers yesterday and they weighed 2#! A meal for three right there, and the exact opposite of the hen egg size 🙂
Wow! How do you store them? Burlap sacks, cans with sawdust? Also, I hope you post your winter squash results!!! I picked up a few samples of a bunch of varieties to try. So I know what we like for next year!
Photobby, click on the link in the post (maroon sentence) and it will take you to a earlier post and that post will take you to an even earlier post about my potato storage. Perfect for our Pacific Northwest climate and temporary too if need be.
Squash looks to be quite good despite my fears, and with this stretch of dry weather I am leaving them on the vine for a little longer. Soon as I harvest them I will post.
my favorite poem about potatoes; by nancy willard; please forgive if the formatting is wrong.
The plant lifts easily now, like an old tooth.
I can free it from the rows of low hills,
hills like the barrows of old kings
Where months ago, before anything grew or was,
we hid the far-sighted eyes of potatoes.
They fingered forth, blossomed, and shrank,
and did their dark business under our feet.
And now it’s all over. Horse nettles dangle
their gold berries. Sunflowers, kindly giants,
in their death-rattle, turn stiff as streetlamps
Pale cucumbers swell into alabaster lungs,
while marigolds caught in the quick frost
go brown, and the scarred ears of corn gnawed
by the deer lie scattered like primitive fish.
The life boats lifted by milkweed ride light
and empty, their sailors flying.
This is the spot. I put down my spade,
I dig in, I uncover the scraped knees
of children in the village of potatoes,
and the bald heads of their grandfathers.
I enter the potato mines.
I love it – especially after just reading the childrens book, Greener Grass about the potato famine. Thanks!
Looks amazing! I’m just about to plant my potatoes out here in San Diego, CA for the first time. We’ve had a rainy week the previous week so I didn’t get any potatoes in the ground, but it is now Potato time in my area. It still amazes me how in growing your own food how much you can really produce with the land that you have.
Laura, that is amazing you’re able to plant now – good luck on your future harvest!
That is a good harvest, considering all the weather, voles and whatnot. A few years back we had an awful potato year, they were small and not many under each plant, then I ordered some OP seed potato and we’re off and running again. I harvested true seed this year and am going to attempt to grow our own 1st year potatoes early next Spring( indoors, then into the greenhouse when the weather is warm enough). I love experimenting and learning/ trying new skills! I always say, one is NEVER to old to learn or rethink what they’ve already learned*wink*
We didn’t actually weight ours but “guestimated” approx. 400-500 lbs, alittle less than last year, but we planted less too*wink*, because we didn’t get 150 lbs used up from the year before. Those 150lbs didn’t got to waste, we fed them to the pigs and the poultry( cooked), we just didn’t use them ourselves, thus the reason we cut back a bit on planting. :o)
Blessings for your weekend,
Kelle
Kelle, I thought it was pretty good too, we have cut back on potatoes since my husband is allergic to them, so it’s been interesting to see how many we actually use, this amount may be about right. I was a little skeptical as to how they would actually do – and was relieved to see such nice potatoes.
Looking forward to watching your potato experiment!
I guess some potatoes like it hot and some like it cool. My purple vikings did not sprout at all, but several other varieties went crazy.
Potatoe storage and soil question for you- I’m a home farmer in Halifax and we plant Red Chieftains up here, really good, thin skinned red potatoes. I’m thinking about trying your straw bale root cellar; I have a sheltered spot. The winters get pretty cold here, for a month or two, sometime going down to say, 10 degrees F. What do you think, could they be OK in that kind of cold?
Another query, do you think you need to amend the soil much that potatoes grew in? I’m thinking compost and maybe digging seaweed right into the soil before the winter sets.
Cheers,
Hudson
Hudson, we can get down to 10F also here although it never lasts much more than a week, at a time, and my potatoes have been fine. Mine are in a barn though, so no chance of getting wet, but no chance of heat either. The only time I had a failure was when I used some of our grass hay bales instead. There are more air spaces in the the straw stalks, and the straw bales are tighter, giving more insulation than just hay. If you’re not sure of the arrangement, keep a thermometer in with the potatoes and be prepared to move them if it does appear they will freeze – I used to put mine in 50 # boxes, now I use recycled 25# fruit boxes, which are much easier to move if need be. Part of my older wiser regime 😉
As for fertility, I plant potatoes following corn which I fertilize heavily with composted manure, and the residual is perfect for the next years crop of potatoes. That being said, compost and seaweed beforehand would be great too.