Harvesting Potatoes
Harvesting Potatoes The Right Way
Harvesting potatoes can be a very exciting and educational project, and if there are any special children in your life you may want to share the project with them as well. Unlike most crops that we grow regularly, we are unable to see the yield of our hard work, and that of Mother Nature, until we get dirty digging them up. We can see our tomatoes, our green beans, pea pods, corn, and cucumbers. We know while they are growing whether or not they had been affected by pests, by too much or too little rain, and whether they have had enough or too much sun. But we don’t know what has become of our tubers until we are ready for harvesting potatoes.
Be sure that you schedule your harvest on a dry but sunless day, as potatoes should not be subject to moisture until just before cooking. To begin harvesting potatoes, you will want to start at the farthest point from the plant as possible. If you have planted your potato plants two feet apart, as recommended by the experts, then you will break ground one foot away from the plant. Dig downward in a circle around the plant, and try not to pierce any of the tubers. Once you have loosened the soil, you can begin carefully pulling upward on the chunks of soil with a shovel or pitchfork, bringing the vegetables to the surface. This is the exciting part of harvesting potatoes, as you sift through to see just how many tubers you have been blessed with. Anywhere from three to twenty potatoes will pop up.
Once you have sifted all of the potatoes to the surface, allow them lay for a few hours in the open. This will help the moisture from the ground to dissipate from the skin of the potatoes before they are packed away. This is a very important step in the process of harvesting potatoes, for any undue moisture content can spell disaster for your crop. Once this air drying time has elapsed, you will want to brush any access soil off of them, carefully, as the skins can be very tender at this stage. Hand brushing will do. They can then be placed in meshed bags, or paper if you can not find the meshed variety.
On large farms, harvesting potatoes is a much more sophisticated and time consuming affair, as heavy equipment and many hired hands work diligently until the potatoes are safely tucked away for storage. You can often receive permission for harvesting potatoes from these farmers once they have cleared a field. There are often many potatoes left behind by the machines, some because they are too small, and others because they are too big. Waste not, want not.