how to harvest potatoes

It’s time! The potatoes are finally ready! We started harvesting them last weekend.

After potato plants bloom, the leaves start to turn brown, and eventually the potato plant part dies. You can begin harvesting potatoes any time after the plant blooms (new potatoes!), but waiting a week or two after the plants turn brown helps the potatoes to develop thicker skins if you want to keep your potatoes around for a little while.

We pulled out a mini hoe, shovel, and wheel barrow and began to dig away!

Here is our little potato patch.

We planted 6 different varieties of organic potatoes this year, and you can read more about how we did it here. As we started digging, it was so fun to see what color the potatoes would be!

Hi potato! There you are!

Is it a cranberry red or red cloud? I’m not sure.

So you remove the dying potato plant from the soil, and then gently dig down into the soil sifting through to pick out the potatoes. Some of our potatoes were pretty big, some were very teeny, and just one was a little rotten. Ewwwww.

The rest came out quite dirty, but nice and firm with skins intact.

We have harvested 4 plants so far, and here is our bounty.

I love the color of the purply-blue ones. They are called all-blue.

We are quite thrilled with how our first year of growing potatoes has turned out! It was a nice harvest last week.

While our squashes failed this year, so far in August we have gotten tremendous amounts of bush lake beans, roma tomatoes, melons, and beets.

Now what to make? Should I roast the potatoes? Warm potato salad? Home fries? Scalloped? What is your favorite fun potato dish?

Tags: beans, beets, gardening, gratitude, organic, potatoes, summer, tomatoes

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 at 11:37 pm and is filed under The Growing Season. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.