Spud Harvest

We dug potatoes last week.  It took us a whole 2 hours to harvest our potato crop.  It took longer to hook up to the digger then it did to dig them.  Yep, that's me picking up the spuds.  I finally got my Farmer to snap a picture of me working so I could post it.

 Here is my Farmer in the tractor starting down the potato rows.  He is pulling the cross-over digger.  This machine digs 2 rows at a time.  

 As the blades go down in the ground under the potatoes, the dirt and potatoes go up a chain that has a slight bounce to it.  As it all travels up the chain, the dirt sifts out, leaving the potatoes on the chain.

Then the potatoes fall onto another chain that is crossing over in another direction.  This chain then drops the potatoes on the ground.  Typically, the spuds would drop between 2 un-dug rows and then another digger would come along and pick up the two un-dug rows along with the dug potatoes, so 4 rows total.  The spuds then travel up the chains on that machine and eventually travel up a conveyor that dumps them into a truck.  Since we only have a few to dig, we skip this last part.  No big digger and no spud truck.  We just pick them up by hand and put them in sacks to store in the potato cellars.  And now instead of filling the cellars with 30+ semi-loads of potatoes, we put a pickup load in.  It also seems pretty crazy to use the one machine for such a small amount of spuds, but we have it so we use it.  And it does go faster than just using a shovel.   

This is me admiring a nice baker.  This is something my Farmer's grandpa did.  I can still picture him standing beside the sorting table, watching the potatoes go by, and when he spotted that perfect baker he would pick it up, and start gently rubbing the dirt off, almost as if he was petting it.  He knew how hard it was to grow a nice crop of spuds, so he would take the time to admire a nice looking potato.  He took a lot of pride in our potato crops.  I think he is the reason we still grown the large garden spot of potatoes that we do.  I believe it's my Farmers way (and mine too) of staying connected to his family heritage.