Back in the day while working on our families farm in the summer, my uncle would use my two cousins and myself to fill in where needed, and lots of time it was hot hard work. Digging out Johnson grass in the middle of endless can fields, scraping down equipment and painting it with no shade in sight and plowing fields from the start of the day to the end of the day. We didn’t like a lot of the work, but it did transform restless youth in to sleeping zombies at night. There was no worries about us causing trouble as we went to bed early and woke up early. We also always had small gardens scattered about sometimes my uncle would plant potatoes and some years they really did well. We would go out with some of the guys that worked for us and use a middle buster and run it down the row to through the potatoes out and then we would gather them up and put them in sacks. Believe it or not we stored them in a shed that we built storage racks in ( picture bunk beds with wire where a mattress would be and they would last months and months. It was damn hard work but hey, back then we fine physical specimens built for work like that.
I love potatoes cooked anyway possible, so the payoff was always worth the effort.
For the last few years I’ve been wanting to plant some potatoes but life got in the way, but I made the effort and planted some this year. I went and bought 3 bags of organic potatoes from Trader Joe’s and cut them up and put them in the ground. You have to use organic potatoes because lots of times potatoes are treated with products that inhibit them from sprouting. The garden I was planting them in is a new area we plowed up last year. My cousin got the ground ready and one afternoon in late February or early March I planted them. The old timers say you have to plant when the moon is right and others say you have to cut the seed potatoes up and wait a day or so to harden them. I did none of that and they took off like a rocket. They were planted in bone dry dirt and we got a rain maybe 7-10 days later and the race was on. We dig some by hand a week or so ago and they looked beautiful so we made plans to dig them this weekend.
We got the bush hog out and clipped the top of the row then my cousin got the old Allis Chalmer 175 out with a middle buster plow that is way older than the tractor and we got to work. The old tractor moved gracefully down the tow and the plow did its job. When my cousin got off the tractor after plowing the middle out we started picking them up and my mind ran back to those hot summers days when my younger self was doing the same thing. They say history does repeat itself and today was one of those days. If you don’t have a garden, start one this fall. Fall gardens are easier to grow. If you have kids take them out and show them how things grow and what it takes to make food. There are way too many kids that don’t have a clue and think stuff magically appears on the grocery store shelves. Take care my friends,
and I hope your garden has a bountiful supply of veggies and a poor supply of weeds.
I love potatoes cooked anyway possible, so the payoff was always worth the effort.
For the last few years I’ve been wanting to plant some potatoes but life got in the way, but I made the effort and planted some this year. I went and bought 3 bags of organic potatoes from Trader Joe’s and cut them up and put them in the ground. You have to use organic potatoes because lots of times potatoes are treated with products that inhibit them from sprouting. The garden I was planting them in is a new area we plowed up last year. My cousin got the ground ready and one afternoon in late February or early March I planted them. The old timers say you have to plant when the moon is right and others say you have to cut the seed potatoes up and wait a day or so to harden them. I did none of that and they took off like a rocket. They were planted in bone dry dirt and we got a rain maybe 7-10 days later and the race was on. We dig some by hand a week or so ago and they looked beautiful so we made plans to dig them this weekend.
We got the bush hog out and clipped the top of the row then my cousin got the old Allis Chalmer 175 out with a middle buster plow that is way older than the tractor and we got to work. The old tractor moved gracefully down the tow and the plow did its job. When my cousin got off the tractor after plowing the middle out we started picking them up and my mind ran back to those hot summers days when my younger self was doing the same thing. They say history does repeat itself and today was one of those days. If you don’t have a garden, start one this fall. Fall gardens are easier to grow. If you have kids take them out and show them how things grow and what it takes to make food. There are way too many kids that don’t have a clue and think stuff magically appears on the grocery store shelves. Take care my friends,
and I hope your garden has a bountiful supply of veggies and a poor supply of weeds.
