The potato harvest

I finally – finally! – finished harvesting the potatoes. This turned into a far longer process than I anticipated.

I originally planted eight beds of potatoes in April. However I had an additional three beds where so many volunteer potatoes sprang up (doubtless from the little marble-sized potatoes that never got uncovered during last year's harvest) that I might as well have planted 11 beds. I like to rotate potato beds every year, so those three beds of volunteer potatoes grew in the same beds two years in a row.

Ironically, since we haven't had our first frost yet, the potatoes plants have stayed green and healthy. However the weather reports keep teasing us with juuuust above-freezing temperatures at night, so I knew I wouldn't get much more growth from the tubers. Time to dig them up.

It was a big task, so I divvied it into bite-sized pieces by just harvesting one (sometimes two) bed(s) a day. I started on Oct. 9 and finished on Oct. 18.

The reason for the slow harvest was because it was hard going. The soil in the raised beds was clay-ier than I anticipated, and digging was slow. Next spring, I'll work more compost and sand into each bed before planting.

Still, the harvest was abundant. This is about two beds' worth of taters.

Sizes ranged from tiny marbles to great big bakers.

A few had new growth in the touching hope that winter wasn't imminent.

One delightful surprise as I was digging was the sheer quantity of worms. There were hundreds. Thousands. Some were enormous, true night-crawler size. Others were little red wigglers.

When the wheelbarrow was fairly full from the first few beds...

...I stopped to sort the potatoes by size into crates.

I divvied them into large, medium, and small sizes. This was not an exact science. I figured the dividing point between "medium" and "small" was whether a potato was large enough to hold easily while peeling. If not, it went into the small crate.

Then it was back to digging. Soon the garden had that autumn torn-apart look to it.

Occasionally one or another cow (or calf, in this case) would pause to watch what I was doing.

At first we thought we would store the harvested potatoes in the crates in a cool room, but it soon became apparent we had far more potatoes than crates. So we ordered about a dozen gunny sacks.

Spoiler alert, gunny sacks are fantastic! As in, where-have-you-been-all-my-life fantastic. We should have bought these years ago.

I rolled the tops down on a few and started sorting again.

Many of the potatoes, it must be said, were very creative-looking. 

When all was said and done, I ended up with seven sacks of potatoes: three filled with large potatoes, three with medium, and one (very heavy) sack with small potatoes.

Darcy was very interested. While I was digging up the garden beds, he was a big help. It seems he really, really likes raw potatoes, and I had to be careful to keep them away or he'd chow down.

Since freezing temps aren't expected for a few more days, I'll leave the potatoes where they are to continue drying.

Meanwhile I brought out a bathroom scale and weighed each bag, then tallied. We harvested 230 lbs. of potatoes.

I foresee a lot of potato dishes this winter.