There are a few hallmarks of August in a yuppie homesteadin’ lifestyle. There’s chopping wood and getting the woodshed filled. There’s the gathering of wild fruits to wash and freeze for a Thanksgiving pie. And then, there’s the biggest: harvesting the garden.
Harvesting the garden comes in waves. The first wave starts with the tomatoes and in a good year, you ride that wave everyday. This year, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. Every day, rain or shine, I go out and pick the fruit that’s ripe that day. Essentially, you have to do that. Wait an extra day, and either the birds harvest for you or the fruit begins to deteriorate. Wait a day and you may also just about overburden yourself. I went from the small metal bowl I use when the harvest first starts to the largest metal bowl we have yesterday. Pretty soon, it’s two bowls. And that’s for a daily harvest. If I harvested every other day, outside of increasing the waste, I would also overwhelm myself. Particularly because once the tomatoes come in, they need to be washed, chunked up and sent through the KitchenAid mixer attachment to be reduced to pulp while the seeds and skins are extracted. The biggest time killer of that process is cleaning the attachment every day. (The mixer and attachment becomes a permanent fixture on my countertop throughout the tomato harvest season.)
Outside of the daily tomato harvest, which starts so slowly you wouldn’t notice it, there are the individual item harvests. To date, we now have all of the garlic and about 1/3 of the onions drying. But yesterday was the big initial harvest: two rows of potatoes dug up. For those of you counting, that was 50 row feet of garden.
When the season first starts, I count our garden progress by the rows of garden planted. Each row is about 25 feet, although three rows are smaller and two (sometimes three) rows are larger. In total, there are 14 rows and you’re just going to have to trust me that it works out to 350 row feet (some years more, some less). Anyway, I count the rows planted. Initially, it’s like, “Whew, we got three rows planted. Only 10-11 more to do… .” Then, the converse happens in August through the end of the growing season. For example, yesterday as we were digging up potato rows, I noticed that we had 3.5 rows of garden dug. Only 10.5 more to go.
There is something about getting to halfway done with the garden that is immensely satisfying. At this point, we’re only 25 percent of the way there. But until you get halfway done, it’s still a bit of uneasy process. Will your effort be worth it? Will something come along and wipe out the crops just before harvesting? Will this year’s garden be a boon or a bust? Yet, when you get halfway done, you can reasonably be assured that you will get your money’s worth out of all of the effort.
In that vein, yesterday’s potato digging is one of the big unknowns of the garden. Essentially, you know how the tomatoes are doing – and they represent 2.5 rows of the garden – because you harvest them everyday. The same goes for beans which you see growing on the vine or even onions and beets, which pop out slightly from under the soil and you can see the size of the bulbs. But taters? Honestly, they’re just one big surprise. And yesterday? Well, it was a mixed bag.
The weakness of potatoes is that late rain can destroy all of your hard work by soaking the ground and rotting the potatoes. We have little drainage ditches built into our potato rows for that specific purpose. But… well, the russets are just temperamental taters. They like it just right – too much water and they easily rot; too little and they only grow marbles. Yesterday? We had a lot of rot. The 25-foot row of russets is likely going to yield about 8-10 pounds of potatoes. Hardly worth the effort.
But on the flipside…
The Adirondack reds rocked it out of the park. We likely have 30 pounds of potatoes there. And a huge variety of sizes. Definitely have the small, “early” potatoes but also some good-sized bakers and some oven-fry sized potatoes. Ultimately, I’m happy. The red potatoes made up for the russets. Plus, there are still two garden rows of potatoes to go. One – a 30-foot row – is mostly Adirondack blue potatoes but with some russets thrown in at the end. The other is German butterball, which is my favorite potato. Both rows are still going strong, but I’m now hopeful after seeing the red potatoes.
Today, I begin the process of storage. After washing all of the potatoes yesterday and setting them out to dry overnight, I sort the potatoes by size and type and then get them into boxes to go to the basement. From there, they will go into a basic kitchen refrigerator to stay cold and dormant until they become dinner.
And that’s it. But, I will just share this great highlight of our last year’s garden harvest: I ran out of those potatoes in late June and had to buy potatoes in July only. Not too shabby, right? That’s why I do it. And that’s why, as soon as I hit “post” to this little missive, I’ll be packaging up our harvest.
The Yuppie Homesteader 