Harvesting new potatoes
Internet
sources tell me to harvest new potatoes when:
- The potatoes begin to bloom.
- The calendar changes to June.
- The peas are ripe.
I noticed the first
flowers on our potato plants this weekend, so I decided to dig around
and see what's there. The result? The potatoes are past the
tiny new potato stage I love, and are already swelling into the
half-fist-size zone. I guess option 3 is the best indicator for
my garden since the peas have been ripe for a week or two, which is
just about when I should have harvested new potatoes.
Most
people harvest new potatoes by grubbing them out from around the bases
of plants, leaving some tubers in place to finish growing. I
opted to just yank out two plants since they were encroaching on my
biggest tomato's growing zone. This gave me a great opportunity
to explore the benefits of my modified
Ruth Stout method,
and I'm totally sold on the heavy mulch. The potatoes required
just a little digging with the trake, but they came out clean and
beautiful, with nary a spot of green. The area is also nearly
weed-free despite never being weeded (though I did toss a few more
handfuls of grass clippings on insipient weeds a few weeks ago.)
I picked a bowlful of
our stunning sugar snap and snow peas, cut up the first basil leaves of
the year, and added the rest of the ingredients for a modified Green Bean and
Potato Salad.
The taste of summer!
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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