Garden Journal, Digging Potatoes At The Community Garden

Hello, hivers and garden lovers!

Today was a really nice day, especially considering that it's the middle of October in the upper Great Lakes region of the U.S. We still have not had our first night of frost this fall, although it's coming soon, probably by the end of the week.

I've been needing to get on with digging the potatoes that I grew in my plots at the local community garden. We had several days of rain over the past week or so and the dirt was wet, so I didn't want to dig then. Today was about the third day with no rain, so I decided that the ground would be dry enough to not be a muddy mess for digging.

These are the 2 plots that have potatoes in them.
This plot had 7 rows of potatoes, I had previously dug 5 of those rows. You can see the 2 rows that still needed to be dug.

This is the other plot. This plot has 8 rows of potatoes in it. I had not started digging in this plot yet.

I also still have the 2 straw bales that I planted potatoes in. You can see the new borage plants sprouting from around the second bale. I think there's going to be borage sprouting all over this plot next year from seeds from the big plant at the end of the second straw bale.

I broke open the first bale to see if any potatoes grew in it, I was not disappointed.

This is the yield from the first bale.

The results of both bales. Not bad at all for 4 plants in 2 straw bales.

I decided to dig the last 2 rows in the plot that was almost done before doing anything with the other plot. These are Yukon Gold potatoes in the last 2 rows. This is the result of digging the first row. I was pretty happy with what I got from that row. There were very few tiny potatoes, and quite a few big ones. The black bucket is for the weeds that I pull out as I'm digging the potatoes.

This is the yield from the second row. These were also really nice potatoes, except there were more bug holes in these. Perhaps there were more grubs and screw worms in the dirt here at the edge of the garden. Still, the bugs don't eat much...

After finishing this plot, I still had a bit of energy left, so I decided to dig up the 2 partial rows in the other plot. Only about half of the potatoes that I planted last spring came up in those 2 rows, so I figured it would be fairly easy to dig them up. These are Adirondack Blue potatoes. I got a nice bucket full of them from the 2 partial rows.

Here's one more picture for you. These are the last of the red potatoes that I dug up a week ago before we got the rain. I had them drying after spraying the dirt off them with the hose.

I still have 6 more rows of potatoes to dig up, and then I'll be done digging for this year. I have 2 more rows of the blue potatoes, and 4 rows of white potatoes. I've already gotten a nice harvest so far, so I expect that I'll have a really good harvest once I get them all dug.

That's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!