Planting Potatoes

Red seed potatoes.

You may be surprised to see what a potato seed looks like. It looks like a potato, because it is one! That's a couple of red seed potatoes above.

Lorie, one of our cutting machines.

To prepare the potatoes for planting, we needed to cut the red potatoes into two to three smaller pieces. Each piece needed an eye, which is like a raised spot. In larger farms, there's a machine that does the cutting, but we're small so our cutting machines were Lorie and Tracy! (That's Lorie, left.)

Last week, we got all of our potatoes in the ground. We planted three varieties. The red potatoes are shown above. We also planted Lehighs, which are a yellow color and are especially good for boiling, like salt potatoes,. We also planted Adirondack Blues, which are bright blue all the way through the potato. If you have a mandoline, you'll be able to cut them thin to make blue potato chips! Or put all of the varieties together to make a beautiful red, white and blue potato salad!

Red potatoes, ready for planting.

This is just the red potatoes, drying overnight before planting. All in all, the potatoes took up four rows, each row about 750 feet long. That's a lot of potatoes! We planted plenty because everyone seems to love potatoes and they are especially delicious fresh from the ground