Soilman has a great video about how to harvest potatoes for storage. In a nutshell he says to cut the plants down and wait 10 days before digging them up. This will protect them from blight the plants might have and increase their storage life.
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| The uncut potato bed 4 feet by 20 feet. |
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| Q. James with his cute boots gave a hand. |
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| He's quite handy with the clippers. |
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| He works super fast! |
This was a brand new garden bed. We dug it last April specifically for potatoes. We amended the soil with hay and composted manure. We planted potatoes we piled dirt and hay as around the plants as they grew with high hopes for a big harvest. But we were not very impressed with it. We planted 10 pounds and harvested 28. We've gotten much more than this from our regular garden in the past.
Maybe the soil needs more work. I also think we harvested the potatoes to early. They were pretty small. Maybe it was the kind we chose. We had German Butterball, Russet Burbank, Katahdin and Red Pontiac. Out of them all, Red Pontiac did the best. We'll plant Red Pontiac again next year. The rest will probably not make the list.
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| 10 days later we harvested 28 pounds from about 10 pounds of starts. | | | | |
As far as potato storage goes, at least we have a couple more rows of Green Mountain left in the garden to harvest. Hopefully they'll be more plenteous.
