Potato harvest, 2017

Harvest from one Potato bed 2017

 I (well, mostly the husband) planted three beds of potatoes in spring this year.  One was in the main vegetable patch (pictured below), and the other two were in other, shadier parts of the garden.  The first batch in a lightly shaded place was harvested in early September and lasted us the whole month.

All dug up (cabbages in holding bed in foreground)

I dug up the second (main veg patch) bed last week on a nice sunny, breezy day.  I brushed off excess mud from the potatoes, let them dry on my patio for around 24 hours, and have now stored them in an old paper feed sack in my garage.  I expect them to last the whole month of October. 

Unlike the first batch, this second batch has some evidence of bug damage;  potato eelworm maybe?  But the damage is pretty mild, and there were only about five tubers I had to discard, out of about 50.

There's still one batch to dig up.  As mentioned in a previous post, I suspected blight at the end of September, so cut off all the leaves;  I also let the chickens onto that bed to help tidy it up for a few days.  I'll dig them up in a day or two.  I'm curious as to how this harvest compares to the other two:  it's the shadiest bed, but had loads of chicken manure on it the winter before;  the plants eventually grew about as tall as me--and I'm 172 cm!