Symbolic Harvest

Last night we dug the balance of the potatoes from our first garden on the land. This spring we planted some fruit trees, grape vines, strawberries, and blackberries. They've done pretty well, given the rather sporadic care we've been able to give them over the summer.

We did have a neighbor and friend plow up a couple long, narrow strips to start our garden, as well. The strips are about 15-20 feet wide and about 250 feet long, I'd guess. The ground has been in alfalfa for quite a few years, and before that it had been tobacco for quite a few years. The grounds is a loamy clay, but does have some rocks, which is a new experience for me, personally. We've learned to just toss the rocks off to the side as we work and then we pick them up and dump them on a pile in the woods. So far so good.

This year we put the potatoes in a little later than usual--mostly purposeful. We've found that most years, the potato bugs gobble up the potatoes if you get them in first thing in the spring, and if you wait to plant them until later (mid-June for us), you can miss much of the bugs by the time the plants start getting large. We also use quite a few "King Harry" potatos from a place in Maine and they live up to their hype of being resistant to the potato bugs. They're also really nice keepers and uniform in size and shape, so you don't have all those little protrusions that tend to break off. We also planted some russets, which did well too, but they tend to have more strange shapes.

One thing we've noticed is the King Harrys tend to spread out quite a bit, rather than growing in one big mound like the Russets. This has its advantages and disadvantages. The advantage to the King Harrys is that in tighter soil, they can spread out on top, and don't seem to have a problem being constricted like the Russets. The disadvantage is it takes quite a bit more work digging the King Harrys because you have to dig up most of the patch, rather than right around the dead stem, like the Russets.

One thing we did this year is our first hay crop--which was some alfalfa, but mostly grass and immature weed--I clipped with my BCS tractor and sickle attachment and then we raked it up and spread it out over the potato patch--rather thickly in places. The potatos came up through the hay and the hay helped keep the weeds down. Many of the potatoes just grew near the top of the soil and under the hay, which helped. I think we'll do this again next year.

I'm going to attach a couple photos I took of the crew (my dad, my brother, my wife, and kids) as we dug potatos. Symbolically, this was an important first harvest for us.