A quick update on this first potato harvest.
In early May, I posted about growing potatoes in bags. Last week, I made the decision to harvest. Under better circumstances, I would have waited longer before harvesting, but this year we are having an extremely wet summer and this effects potatoes negatively in two ways:
- Too much water causes the potatoes to rot
- Too much moisture causes the potatoes to contract a fungal disease called early blight
In point in fact, my potatoes were suffering from early blight which shows up as small black spots on the leaves and spreads as the disease progresses. Not wanting to risk the whole crop or spread the early blight, I decided to get while the getting was good.
Harvesting Using The Flaps on The Grow Bags
The bags I purchased in which to grow my potatoes, have flaps on the side. You can open a flap and reach into the bag to harvest a potato. This feature lets you harvest some fingerling potatoes and leave others to grow to full maturity, or just harvest over time.
I tried this method of harvesting and after several seconds of searching, found and removed a potato. However, the skin on the Yukon Gold is very soft and I ended up damaging the skin in the process of removing it from the bag. Since I was going to harvest all the potatoes at once, I decided on a different approach.
The Dump 'em Method
I "harvested" by first cutting off the plant stems and throwing them away (Normally, I compost leaves and stems but I didn't in this case because they were infected with early blight and I want to prevent the spread of this disease.) I then dumped the contents of the entire bag onto the ground and enlisted my 7 and 8 year old helpers in digging around to find the potatoes. The kids had a blast doing this, each kid competing to see if they could find the largest one.
The dump 'em method was very easy and we were able to quickly find all the potatoes without damaging any of them. This is the way to go in my opinion.
Based on the instructions that came with the grow bag, I should have expected about 12 pounds of potatoes but I ended up with 7. Still, I think this harvest is good enough to call it a win and the potatoes are just beautiful as you can see in the attached photo.
One more t thing.... unless you like having dirt under your finger nails, where gloves when you harvest potatoes. Same for the kids.
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