Potatoes, much like onions and garlic, seem to be ever present in stores, farmers markets, and even in our CSA boxes. Their ubiquity masks that, like most crops, they have specific growing and harvest seasons.
We grow two potato crops. We plant our spring crop in mid-February and the fall crop in mid-August. The fall crop often is ready starting in early November, only two and a half months. The spring crop will be ready starting in May/June, depending on when we were able to plant and the weather while they’re growing.
The first potatoes we harvest are new potatoes. These potatoes haven’t converted their simple sugars into starch and they have thin, delicate skins, meaning we have to be careful when handling them. We go through the field with an undercutter implement on the tractor, a bar that goes below the plant to loosen the soil and lift the potatoes closer to the surface (see this video for an example) where they can be picked up by our harvest crew.
The rest of the potatoes aren’t harvested this way. Instead, once the potatoes have reached the right size, we mow the plants, terminating their growth, then we wait one to three weeks for the skins to set. Once the skins have set, we can use a mechanical harvester, a potato digger! It would be too rough on new potatoes.
Here’s a video of the potato digger in action:
As you can see, it makes the work faster and easier by lifting the potatoes to the surface. We do have a model of this harvester (like in this video) that has a delivery arm that directly deposits the potatoes into a harvest bin, avoiding the need to pick them up in buckets, but we haven’t been able to use it. This machine works best for sandy soil that doesn’t clump and will fall through the spaces on the chain. We have heavier soil (more clay) that results in a harvest bin half full of soil if we used this implement. The spacing on the chain can be adjusted, but larger spacing would drop most of our potatoes on the ground, not just the dirt clods. We’d love to move away from bending down to pick them off the ground, but haven’t found the right fit yet.
We love getting you freshly dug potatoes, but we eventually reach the point where we need to harvest them and put them in cold storage. If we leave them in the ground, they’ll rot, especially in the summer heat. In fall, we’re racing to finish harvesting before it rains and we can’t mechanically harvest. Harvesting with a digging fork, while doable, is much slower. So the race is on to harvest potatoes as fast as we can and the potato digging team is very busy. Thanks to their hard work, and some very happy plants, all the potato lovers will have a good supply of tasty taters throughout the summer!
Elaine Swiedler, CSA Manager
