Digging potatoes

We started the summer with seven tom turkeys. Then there were five, which is not too surprising, given their propensity for playing in the road. Whenever I hear the milk trucks honking up north, I know where the turkeys are.

Five tom turkeys

This week, there were seven again. Terry’s hypothesis was that two of this year’s juveniles tried to join the gang. 

And then there were seven

I am not. familiar with how turkeys disperse. There is often some mechanism for preventing inbreeding. It is not unusual for young males to get run off. In any case, after hanging around for a few days, the group of toms was back to five. For now. But even the Fab Five seem to be a loose assemblage of three and two. I wonder if it’s the same turkeys in the group of two and the group of three. Terry thinks yes, but we really can’t be sure unless we somehow get close enough to hit them with different colors of spray paint. That might be a good project for retirement. Turkey chasing.

You'll never catch me!

We had our first frost Saturday morning. The basil always takes it in the shorts. Such a wussy plant.

Frosted basil. The reddish leaves will soon be black.

We had rain Saturday night. Hilda forgot to bring the food in from the chicken run. The girls were still eating from it when I let them out in the morning, so I left it. When we went out to dig the potatoes Sunday afternoon, Juanita had figured out a new way to get the goods. Silly chicken.

Juanita takes a short cut to the food

We weren’t sure what to expect from the potatoes. As I wrote recently, potatoes keep their secrets. There’s no telling how many potatoes are underground until you put the shovel in the ground. Having lost them all to a flood last year, Terry opened up the north garden again, since it is on higher ground. And it didn’t flood, but the south garden did again and again. As we dealt with the south garden, the north garden got overrun with grass. We pulled all the grass once, and I thought the potatoes would recover. Alas, we were too late. In addition, the sweet potatoes rapidly took over—vines everywhere!

Terry was anxious to dig the potatoes ahead of some serious rain that we are expecting tonight. Sunday began with drizzle, causing us to postpone the digging until after lunch. Terry started digging, and the potatoes were not too muddy. And so we pressed on. This is the first time in my memory that we have been swarmed by mosquitoes while digging potatoes. Why didn't the frost kill them? Why? Why?

Hilda and Terry dig potatoes. 

The potatoes growing around the edges, where the grass was thickest, didn’t have much going on. We got a good number of Kennebec, which are good keepers.

Kennebec

The Red Norland also did fairly well. We have to eat those first, as they don't keep.

Red Norland

We got one bin of Norkota, a type of russet. We only planted one row of those.

Norkota

We planted two rows of Superior, another good storage potato, next to the sweet potatoes. I suspected we wouldn’t get much due to the puniness of the above-ground biomass. True enough, plant after plant had not one tuber. Terry suggested that we just leave it. I said that would probably be okay. Nevertheless, he kept digging. And we got a few. 

Sad, sad yield of Superior potatoes

(And while we worked, I heard car horns and gobbling down by the road.)

As I mentioned before, the sweet potatoes were an experiment we expected to fail. They are quite different to dig from white potatoes as they grow vertically, and the stem is way more persistent. Sometimes we could lift a number of potatoes out still clinging to the vine. Sometimes we had to wiggle them loose, like pulling teeth. Plus you have to pull the vines away to keep from tripping on them and find the main stem to dig up. Crazy.

Sweet potatoes

Hilda got to work spreading the potatoes out to dry for a few days before we put them in the root cellar.

Hilda spreads the potatoes to dry

"We probably got about half of what we hoped for," Terry said of our harvest.

"True," I replied, "But it's still more than we can eat before they sprout and get wrinkly. If we got more, we would just be throwing them out in March."

One more task off the list as we prepare for winter. October already. I can hardly believe it.