Growing Potatoes
A Traditional Maine Crop
This Post is Co-Authored by Angela the Blogger
and her daughter Alexia,
who would like to be an author someday.
At planting time, the potatoes themselves are the seed. To increase the number of plants we get and therefore the number of potatoes, we cut the biggest potatoes in half. When we plant potatoes, we cover them up in a mound of dirt to keep them deep and to help the plants stand up and we continue to mound them back up throughout the year. The photo below is a young potato plant; notice the nice mound of dirt it is sitting in.
Potatoes attract potato bugs. My siblings and I have the job of plucking the potato bugs. We have to squish the potato bugs or else they would make their way back to the garden. This is an important job, otherwise the leaves would be full of holes and the potato plants would not be healthy. The photo below shows the potato plants growing nicely, but there are a few leaves with holes in them; a sign the potato bugs are around and time to start searching for them.
You can tell it is harvesting time when the potato plant leaves start getting a yellowish orange hue. See the photo below for a visual on how they would look.
When it's harvesting time, we prepare by gathering a potato rake or a hoe and some large buckets. These tools will both be useful when we're digging for potatoes. The first step to picking potatoes is pulling up the plants. If there any potatoes that come up with the plant, we can pull them off and put them in the bucket. When we are done pulling up all the plants, we can use our potato rake and scrape the mound to find and potatoes that have certainly fallen off. This job takes a few people as we don't want to miss any potatoes blending in with the dirt. The potato rake can damage the potatoes, so we have to be careful.
When all the potatoes have been collected and are in the bucket, we set down newspaper on the cool dry garage floor where they won't be bothered. We spread the potatoes down on the newspaper and leave them there for a couple of hours to make sure the moist dirt is dry so that it falls right off. If this step is skipped, the potatoes would rot in their bucket or box. This is also the time to sort our potatoes. The little ones we use that week for a meal with boiled potatoes; straight from the garden to the plate! The damaged ones should be used right away or cleaned up and canned. Canning the potatoes might be an extra step now, but it's great for making a delicious brunch later in the year with the potatoes all ready to go.
This picking season, we used some of the damaged potatoes for homemade french fries. This is an especially nice treat for us, because we keep our fryer gluten free so that everyone in our family can enjoy it. When we can't make our own, my husband raves about Gluten Free: Tripp's Farmhouse Cafe and Bakery in Auburn, Maine.
Twice Baked Potatoes
Gluten and Dairy Free
Recipe coming soon...
