New Potatoes and New Beginnings

This was a post that I meant to do last week, but due to my afore-mentioned technical difficulties, I'm just now getting to it.

The last two weeks have been full of planting things: tomatoes, peppers, okra, lettuce, cantaloupe, brassica mix and squash, to be precise. There's plenty more to put in the ground, of course. But in the midst of all this planting, it's easy to forget sometimes about what we've already planted... like potatoes, back in early April.

Yes, they are purple. They're Caribè potatoes.* And they were delicious, soft and tender and melt-in-your-mouth-y when we ate them.


And here is Brian, harvesting away:

Anyways. I just thought everyone might like to see the fruits potatoes of our labors.






*It's best if you pronounce it like Speedy Gonzales.

Potato, Po-tah-to

Yesterday, I had the supreme pleasure of planting potatoes for the first time in my life.

When I was a kid, I remember harvesting potatoes. It was probably my favorite crop to pick from my grandpa's garden. He would hoist the plant out of the air with his pitchfork while I scrabbled through the dirt to find them... it was like a treasure hunt.

Susan, it seems, loves potatoes. She grows six different types, some of which are heirlooms, and almost all of which will be for the farm, not for sale.

The first order of business was preparing the field. We weeded four rows, and dug a trench in each row for the seed potatoes. (That's Brian below - he's one of the other interns.)

Then came the business of preparing the seed potatoes. We cut them into pieces, each of which needed at least two "nodes" on them. Nodes are what eventually turn into eyes.

Some of the potatoes had faces. I named mine.

Fred



Manny



Hubert

We then sloshed the potatoes around in a mixture of mycorhizal fungi and humic acid - the humic acid acts as food for the fungi, which improves the quality of the soil with its presence by increasing the microbial life there. Appetizing, no?

For the actual planting, one person would lay down the potato pieces, skin side up, in the trough. The second person followed with the hoe, covering the seed potatoes and mounding a hill of dirt over them. (Below is Autumn, the third full-time intern on the farm. We are a merry little group.)

Final note: Normally, potatoes are planted in March. By planting later, Susan hopes to escape the worst of the potato bugs... another (less enjoyable) thing I remember from my childhood. We shall see.