I'm Rob Patterson with Utah State University Extension in Carbon County.
Potatoes are pretty straightforward whenit comes to harvesting: they're in the
ground, you dig them out of the ground, so any tool that will dig into the ground
will work. You can use a spade - I prefer to not use a spade because they tend to
get more slice tubers, a little bit more damage, a slice right through them and so
I tend to not use a spade. I prefer to use a garden fork; don't get quite as
much damage typically to my tubers when I use the garden fork - good sturdy garden
fork's a good tool to have. Now digging the potatoes is quite straightforward
but a lot of times I get questions about when is the best time to harvest the
potatoes, how do you know when they're ready, so I'll show you some indicators
that I look at to determine when it's ready for me to dig my potatoes. The
potato is closely related to the tomato and the flowers look a lot like tomato
flowers, they even form a little fruit at the end of the flower stock here; it
looks like a tiny tomato, just a little ball, and then that ball will fall off.
So...so that's one of the first things I look at is when the ball falls off - not
not the flower itself - after the flowering that forms a little ball, the
ball falls off then I start checking for other indicators. This is a pretty good
clue that you're going to have some of those small really nice potatoes. So once
the little fruit balls have fallen off from the plant I start checking the
ground for fissures; if you've got a heavy soil - a clay soil - as those tubers
expand they'll split the ground open. A sandy soil you may not get that quite so
much but...but here I've got some nice fissures showing that I've got some
tuber expansion underground and I'm ready to start harvesting some of these
potatoes. If you get them before, kind of between the fruit fall off and the
fissure formation, you'll probably get small tubers which
are excellent for eating; if you want to get a bit of size on and wait for those
fissures to form. Now I use drip irrigation so I have to be careful with
my drip tube, but you start out about 8 to 12 inches away from the plant, dig
down in, and pull them up. Now if you want to store your potatoes - that's a pretty
good hill, it's got - these are just the right size for this
fresh, fried potatoes...really good. So if you've got a little bit of dirt on your
potatoes you may want to wash them off; if you're going to store them and
they've come out of the garden quite clean you probably don't need to worry
about it too much. So you can dump them on the ground, wash them off - these are
going to be for the market so I'll clean them off a little bit - but use clean water
when you're washing your potatoes off. After you get them washed off you want
to not put them in store - you don't want to store them wet you want to let them
dry off a little bit, so leave them in a shady spot. Ssunlight will turn potatoes
green, so just have to get them washed off then just leave them in shade for a
little bit till they dry and then you can put it in storage.
If - you want the skin to toughen up, the skin on these are just been freshly dug,
if they haven't hardened off in the ground
that's pretty rap- and potatoes will heal themselves - but you want that skin
to toughen up before you get them into storage. So that's why it's better then
to harden them off in the ground and let them toughen up, let that skin toughen up,
before you actually dig them to store them. But if you're just going to eat them fresh
that doesn't matter; if you're just wanting some fresh potatoes to go eat for
breakfast or whatever, as soon as the tuber start forming they're very edible
and very delicious. So there you have it: just another way to have fun in
your garden.