Eyes Up On Good Friday

Good Friday is quickly coming. I only note this because it is a big day on the potato calendar. Where the tradition ever got started to plant them on Good Friday is beyond me....mine will be going in slightly earlier than that if the weather holds out.

Potatoes - one of the first, and most labor intensive, crops to go in during spring planting - are very much worth the work. From the mighty potato comes such wonderful things as: french fries, baked potatoes, mashed potatoes, home fries, fritters, hash browns, new potatoes with rosemary, and potatoes stew with pot roast to name just a few. A tuber worth its weight in gold....especially Yukon Gold.

I ordered the Yukon Gold seed potatoes from Seed Savers this spring since we didn't have any seed potatoes left over from last year. Last year's crop didn't fair so well - a combination of bad type of potatoes and excessive apathy on my part led to a short supply this winter. So, we start again with new seed potatoes which is probably a good idea anyway as potatoes are susceptible to blight....just ask any Irishman.

Potatoes are uniquely programed to start growing when the time is right - regardless of where they are. The conditions have to be favorable, but even in less than ideal circumstances, potatoes with yearn for the sunlight. I discovered this when I kept a crop of potatoes over winter in our root cellar and it became a little warmer than usual toward the end of winter. When I went down to get the potatoes to start planting, I found bags that looked as though they had been attacked by thin-armed octopi - there were eyes sprouting from every potato in the bags and they had grown right out the top and were headed "up" regardless of how much concrete and wood stood in their way.

They truly are one of the most "determined" crops, which makes them fun to grow. My seed potatoes came on a day when I had company over and they were anxious to see what the seeds of potatoes looked like. "Well, they look a little like potatoes" I said with a smile as I brought forth the bags of small, round beautifully kept spuds. "That's the thing about potatoes, the end product is also the starting point." The hardest part, that I have found, is keeping them in the right conditions so that they don't start to sprout too early in the spring.

The seed potatoes that I had purchased needed a little help to get started because they had yet to start producing eyes. I put the bags of seed potatoes into brown paper bags and put a small piece of apple in with them. Then.....I left them alone at room temperature in my kitchen where I would check on them every few days to see how well they were progressing. Why the apple? There is something about apples that makes a potato just want to start sprouting - whatever chemical signal it is, it works well.

As soon as a few eyes appear, I gingerly remove them from the bag...you don't want any eyes to pop off if you can help it. The sharp knife comes out and the carving begins. There are only a few requirements for cutting up seed potatoes - they need to have a little chunk of potato (I think the suggestion is 1 inch square) and they have to have at least 1 or 2 eyes that are starting to sprout. If they are small potatoes, they are best to leave whole. After they are cut, you have to let the healing begin. I typically will either place mine back in the brown paper bag, or I put them on a tray and tuck them somewhere dark for a few days to let the cut surfaces heal over.

The hardest part I have found around here is trying to find new ground upon which to plant the potatoes. They should be rotated to new soil every year and avoid any areas where they have been planted for the last three years- this makes for some interesting shuffling of crops around here, but we can typically carve out an area that hasn't housed a spud for a few years. The soil should be loose and sandy with lots of organic matter - this is where having horses around really comes in handy. A few loads of horse manure and a little tilling and we are good to go.....except for the trench digging.

Digging potato trenches can get to be a full work out. I typically use it for whatever kid is misbehaving the worst on any particular day....it is the farm equivalent of the "hard rock pile". Six inches deep, shovel width wide and don't stop until you run out of room or potato pieces.

The actual planting of the potatoes is a snap.....set them in the trench about 18 - 20 inches apart with their eyes up.

This last part is important. My first year on the farm, I couldn't remember squat with regards to gardening and I am pretty sure that I planted them all with the eyes down, thinking that they were the roots....not so....the eyes are part of the plant that will emerge above ground in a few short weeks. Thankfully, as I mentioned before, potatoes are a determined crop and I think that at least some of those originals did still make it to the surface eventually and the rest are probably still busy growing toward china.  Eyes up - they have to look where they are going.

I will then typically cover the potato pieces with approximately 4 inches of soil and wait. As they start to sprout above ground they can be further covered with another 2 inches of soil and compost to encourage more potatoes. After they are fully sprouting above ground and I have covered them with as much dirt and compost as I can stand to cart around, they get mulched with a thick layer of newspaper and straw to keep out the weeds.

As I write this now I have planted somewhere near 100 potato pieces that, if they produce as they have in the past, will lead to somewhere between 100 and 200 pounds of potatoes at the end of the summer. We will live well on potato soup, home fries, fritters, frittatas, baked potatoes, hash browns, mashed potatoes - you name the dish and a potato can probably be used to make it better. Knowing that they are planted snug in the ground only to be resurrected again in the fall will truly make this a Good Friday indeed.