Oct 31

I dug the last of the potatoes on Halloween. These were at the house garden. I was afraid that I was going to have to dig these by hand due to the small area, but decided that I could use the tractor if I dug half from one direction and than turned the tractor around and dug the second half. This worked well.

Here are the total for the potatoes.

Lasota (50 lbs of seed spuds) 946 lbs
Pontiac (50 lbs of seed spuds) 1454 lbs
Yukon Gold (about 20 lbs of seed spuds) 240 lbs

The Yukon are an earliy variaty and the vines started to die back in August.

We started digging the Pontiac as new potatoes and had eaten about half of the crop at the house garden before I started digging two weeks ago. The Pontiacs at the house garden suffered sunburn (green) more then the ones at the mega garden due to the rocky soil here at the house. As a result I left more on the ground at the house.

I may never know the true weight of the Burbanks due to the row that froze and the number that we didn't harvest due to the shape, but I guess it is somewhere around 300 lbs.

Here are more photos of the tractor and the middle buster set-up.

Oct 30

The carrots were probably the best success of the garden. I have never grown carrots as nice as these. I have been trying to decide how we were going to store them for the winter and decided to leave most of them in the ground and cover them to prevent them from freezing.

I cut the tops off to feed to the goats and then covered the rows with straw. I dug a furrow on both sides of the rows. I laid a cheap blue tarp (5' x 7') over the two double rows and pulled the dirt from the furrows onto the edges of the tarp. After the edges were covered I put soil down the middle of the rows to help hold the tarps down. I did this with four tarps and covered about 1/4th of the carrots this way. I will try to cover another 1/4th this week and dig the rest of the carrots to give away and feed to the animals.

During the winter we will be able to pull one tarp off at a time and dig the carrots. We have a problem with gofers so all I may have done is provided them a good source of food for the winter. We shall see.

The carrots on the left are Danver's and the ones on the right are Nantes. The pictures do not do them justice. Most of these are 8" to 10" long. The Nantes seem to be the most uniform with the Danver's getting to be the biggest.

These are the Nantes

Danver's

Oct 26

I have fond memories my grandpa harvesting his potatoes when I was a kid. A neighbor brought over his tractor with a middle buster and would dig the potatoes. People came out of the woodwork to help pick up the potatoes and fill up the potato pit. I remember grandpa trying to pay his neighbors for their work and they would always refuse his money, but he was able to get them to take home some of the harvest.

I picked up a used sub-soiler a few weeks ago and installed a furrower blade on it basically turning it into a middle buster. I borrowed a neighbors Ford Jubilee tractor and desided to dig the last three rows of the Burbanks with it. I tried to dig on Saturday the 24th, but it started raining hard just after I dug the first row. By the time I got back in the garden on Monday the 26th the exposed potatoes had froze. I dug the last two rows with the tractor as seen in the photos below.

The Burbanks did not turn out well. They were disfigured with side lobes and only a few of them look like what you would buy at the store. The Burbank are the Idaho type russets. I found out that the problem with this variety of potatoes comes from too much heat or lack of water. This will probably be the first and only year I will grow the Burbanks.

Oct 25

Here are some photos of the garden from all four corners. We still have two rows of Burbank potatoes to to dig and the last of the Pontiacs at the house garden. The carrots still need to be covered for the winter.

Oct 23

We finished up the Lasota potatoes and started digging the Pontiac. It looks like the Pontiac will be our best of the four variates of potatoes.

Oct 18

This last week we were able to get the winter squash and the pumpkins out of the garden. We also started to dig the potatoes.

I borrowed an old horse drawn potato harvester-digger. We have a total of 16 rows of the potatoes and have dug 4 of the 6 LaSota rows so far. It took us two rows to figure out what worked best for pulling the harvester, but we settled on driving the suburban backwards with the harvester chained to one of the front hooks. This allowed the driver (Caleb) to keep an eye on the digger and keep it somewhat straight.

I picked up a three point sub-soiler two weeks ago. I am going to add a furrow blade to turn it into a middle buster. I will borrow a tractor from a neighbor this week and try digging spuds with that.

Oct 4

About the only thing left in the garden that is still green are the carrots. The potato vines have been knocked down by the frost and will be ready to dig in a week or two.

We picked the last of the tomatoes yesterday. The garage is full of buckets of green tomatoes. I need to get the pumpkins and winter squash off the ground an under cover this week.

We have most of the drip lines rolled up and ready to put in storage until next spring

The summer squash, melons and peppers have been pulled up and are being fed to the meat goats.

Here are the tomato vines piled up and ready to take to the meat goats

Oct 2

We got our first frost on Sept 21st. It was a light frost that only nipped the squash. A major frost came Oct 28th.

The forth planting of corn was harvested Sept 22nd. We had friends come in and pick all of it. We did not keep track of the number of ears but it would have been the most per row of all of the plantings.

The owner of the land is starting to haul in manure. You can see it in between the rows.

I counted over 175 pumpkins. Some have already been harvested. Total is somewhere around 185.