Potatoes Are Harvested, Weighed and Stored

In the past we've dug our potatoes in nasty, cold, snow-spitting weather so in comparison, yesterday's harvest was very pleasant.  True, it could have been a smidge bit warmer (my hands got cold even with gloves on), but the sunshine was nice and the company was good.

This season I planted three 20' rows of taters.  One row was of our "old" reds that were given to us several (many?) years ago by a farmer friend who had no idea what variety they were.  They provided us with nice potatoes up until last year when they seemed to fizzle out on us and produced mostly small and only a few decent sized spuds.  So that's why I ordered some new red potato sets to try, a row of Red Chieftans.  In the third row, I planted some Burbank Russets when my dear husband (who maintains he definitely prefers a red potato over a white one) wasn't looking.  That gave me one row of the not-so-vigorous-anymore nameless reds, one row of Red Chieftans, and (shhhh!) that row of Burbank Russets.

Fairly predictably (and just why did I even plant them?), the old reds did quite poorly.  Once again, they were small to medium weighing in at only 30-1/2 pounds for the 20' row.

The new Red Chieftans did themselves proud producing a whole bunch of medium/large sized spuds, for a total weight of 50-1/2 pounds for their 20' row.

The white Burbank Russets produced some honkin' big potatoes that are so large I think one of the biggies baked would be too much for the two of us to split.  (If I could talk Papa Pea into eating an-oh-no-white! potato.)  They gave a fantastic crop from the 20' row of 82 pounds.

We'll share the potato bounty with our daughter and her guy (hope they like white ones), and I'm sure we'll all have plenty for this winter.