Fingers Digging For Fingerlings

13 pounds of LaRatte Fingerling Potatoes harvested and washed off.

Some people dig their potatoes with a hoe, a broadfork, or shovel. In fact pretty much every gardening book I've read, says to do so... carefully. My first ever harvested potato (last year) was impaled by a hand trowel. I was extremely excited to find that potato on the end of my trowel however. It wasn't very easy to find. I kept digging and digging. I thought that maybe I wasn't a successful potato grower. Maybe nothing had happened under the soil. My spirits were starting to falter. But, I told myself, "My vines had grown, they had died back, and there are supposed to be potatoes down there dag nabbit!" I had to know for sure. I couldn't leave it to chance that there might be potatoes lurking under the soil. So I dug down deep, deeper than I thought they'd be, and I came up with a potato stuck to my trowel. Hubby was in the backyard doing something to the grass or whatever. I called over to him, "John! I found a potato." No response. I shouted even louder, "I found a POTATO!" That did the trick and he joined me in the garden to help with the potato harvest.

At that point, I sort of lost my aspirations, at least for that season, as a potato harvester since I ruined that first one. I was happy to have company to share my happy potato luck anyway. Hubby took over as the digger of spuds. He gently dug around dislodging each potato from the earth by hand. To me, it's sort of like an easter egg hunt or digging for buried treasure. You never know how much you will find.

The thing is, my garden is situated in the sunniest location we have. That location happens to be on our sloping backyard. The first summer, I just planted my veggies (no potatoes that year) right in the ground with rows going up and down the hill. It was difficult to weed and just generally do anything that way. I don't think the plants minded, but I knew there was a better way. I had always wanted raised beds, before we even had a garden. I thought they looked neater and more orderly and, just easier to maintain. Then when I finally got my garden spot, it was clear that raised beds were definitely the way to go. It's much easier when gardening on a slope.

But... potatoes in a raised bed? Sure, why not. It seems to be working. The only difference, as far as I can see, is in the harvesting. There's not a lot of room for coming in at an angle with a gardening implement to pry the spuds from the ground. So we do it by hand. Your hands are probably the best garden tools around. Can't get any gentler than that for harvesting potatoes. Well, maybe if we used little brushes as the archaeologists do, that could be gentler, but it sure would slow us down. That would be a bit silly I guess, but I like the mental image of us out there brushing the dirt away from our potatoes one at a time. It is fun to dig in with our hands and feel around for them. This is not a task for those that are squeamish about bugs, worms, and other crawly things. Chances are, if you have a garden, you’ll get over that squeamishness quickly because who has time for that when you have work to do?

This weekend we dug some of the potatoes. There are still more plants out there. I’ll probably dig those in a couple more weeks. Here’s a quick video (about 2 minutes) of some of our potato digging day. I did dive in and dig out potatoes with my hands as well. That is after I put the camera away. And yes, we did have potatoes for dinner last night, because we eat what we grow.

To view this video, click the play button (arrow) in the image below. To view additional times, click the refresh button of your web browser, and then click the play button.

Dig It

Root veggies are delicious and good for you too.

I really get a kick out of root crops, or veggies grown underground, I should say. There's just something about digging down and coming up with something that you can actually eat. You never know exactly what you're going to get either. Okay, so when I pull on a carrot top, I know it will be a carrot on the other end, but how big will it be? Sometimes I pull on a bushy looking top thinking it will be a biggun' and end up with a skinny little root.

Now, you'll notice in the picture that there's more than one type of carrot shown. The somewhat regular orange one is a Sugarsnax. A nice enough carrot. But the one that really gets me, is the purple one. I've shown a few of these before. No, you don't need your monitor calibrated, it really is purple, at least on the outside. Some of them are a deep, deep purple and some more of a reddish color. I've noticed that the smaller more immature ones tend to be less purple, although not evident in this bunch. Most of the earlier ones I picked were of the lighter color and Hubby was calling them, "striped carrots". If you were to slice the carrot, you'd see a few millimeters of purple and then an orange core. I suppose if I peeled it with one of my more aggressive peelers, I'd be back to orange carrots again. I like to leave that purple part on and give it a good scrub under the water and a light scraping with a knife. After cooking, they remain purple.

A closer look at Purple Haze Carrots freshly pulled from the garden.

Potatoes are a total mystery. The plant can be big or small and that's no indication of what's growing below. I have to dig down deep to find my potatoes and I never know how many or how big they will be. These few pictured at the top of the page would be considered "new" potatoes. They aren't fully grown. The red is "French Fingerling" sometimes called Roseval or Nosebag. An heirloom variety, the story goes that these potatoes made it here in a horse's feed bag. To harvest new potatoes, I try to leave the plant undisturbed and gently dig down below into the soil and sneak a few potatoes out. This leaves the plant intact and able to bring the rest of the crop to maturity.

Beets seem to be a less favored veggie it seems (by others, not me!) and I can't figure out why. They taste good, a sweet veggie, and good for you too. They're high in folic acid, potassium, calcium, and antioxidants. The tops are edible too, full of vitamins, and can be used like any other green. Although, I must admit, I haven't tried them...yet. I also recently came across a recipe for a raw beet salad. Beets are pretty hard when raw, so I bet it would be crisp. I may give it a try some time soon. As for my beets, I've grown golden beets, which are orange on the outside and strikingly yellow on the inside. Also the more well known dark red beets, which are a deep fuschia that I think is beautiful. The juice of which can be used as a dye.