Well, I am not sure if its been all these 90 degree days or if its just time, but our potato plants are starting to look less then excited to be growing. They have started yellowing despite consistent watering in this heat and their leaves are being attacked buy some sort of leaf eating pest. Since we were starting to see some signs of potatoes in the cages it was time to take the worst looking of our four potato cages and see what we got!
The first thing I did was put my newly discovered gardening hat on, and cut all the foliage on top of the cage. Billy got his shovel and we were ready to pull the cage.
Much to my dismay the potatoes did not want to come out! Even when I tuned the cage upside down. The soil and potatoes were firmly in place.
We had to resort to plan B laying the cage on its side and reaching in to dislodge the soil. I would strongly suggest wearing gloves during this process. When reaching in I discovered a couple of potatoes that did not make it, three of them to be exact and the experience of touching what was left of these potatoes was far from pleasing!
After some careful tooling and de-clumping of the soil we were well on our way to having some awesomely fresh red bliss potatoes for dinner!
Our haul from one potato cage with a diameter of a 5-gallon bucket and 3’-0” tall using 4-5 seed potatoes. 18 total potatoes of varying sizes, we lost 4 additional potatoes to some unknown ailment. All in all, not bad considering last years potato crop was a complete disaster. I was disappointed that there did not appear to be any potatoes in the top 12-18” of soil. I am not sure why this happened, but there will be some online researching on potato growing in my near future. I also feel like we may have pulled these potatoes earlier than we should have, because when picking through the dirt there were a lot of clumps with little baby red potatoes about the size of peas that were in the dirt but had not grown. The plants appear to be in such tough shape that we did not want to risk waiting to take a peek and losing the whole crop. I thing we will wait a week before we pull the next cage.