It’s a beautiful cool day! The weather apps can’t seem to make up their mind if we’re supposed to get rain or not in our area, which means we probably will not, so I worked on harvesting potatoes in the old kitchen garden again.
But first, I sorted through last night’s potatoes.
In the first photo above, I sorted the largest potatoes out for curing. The smaller potatoes are the smaller ones, which I brought in for immediate eating.
Not very many left, that’s for sure!
The Red Thumb fingerlings are split between two beds, and I started on the long, narrow one at the retaining wall. The first thing was to remove the mulch, and as you can see by the second picture, there were quite a few potatoes right on the surface, hidden by the straw.
I was also uncovering lots of frogs! With the cooler temperatures, they were pretty sluggish and snoozing under cover.
In the third photo, you can see all the Red Thumb potatoes I harvested from that bed (almost). They are fingerling potatoes, so I would expect them to be small, but they somehow seem smaller than they should be, for this variety. The yield is very nice, though. My guess is that, with better soil conditions, they would have been larger. Later on, we’ll go back to them and separate out the largest ones, and taken the smaller ones inside to eat right away.
What I didn’t get a picture of, but intend to later, are the ones that didn’t make it to the curing screen. I kept finding the tiniest of potatoes! Maybe the other potatoes had tiny ones that that, too, but I just didn’t see them. These potatoes are so red, I couldn’t miss them! I’m not sure what I’m going to do with them. They’re too tiny for eating. Just washing them would be very difficult. I don’t want to just toss them on the compost. I’m considering finding some out of the way spot and just burying them in the fall. Who knows. They might start growing in the spring, like some of our volunteers, this year! 😁
Once the retaining wall bed was done, I removed the mulch from the others in the wattle weave bed. As with the first bed, there were potatoes right on the surface, too.
Holey potatoes.
Some still had slugs on them.
After throwing away the first few I uncovered, I realized this bed was hit by the slugs quite badly. So I took the ones I’d already harvested and laid them out, then took a break. I’ll be getting back at it after I’m done this post. I hope it’s just the surface potatoes that are so badly damaged, but I don’t have high hopes for that bed’s harvest at this point.
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 