A Weekend of Potato-Picking!

As I write this, the cabinets above our refrigerator are stuffed to the gills with fresh-out-of-the-ground potatoes, picked just this Saturday during our annual Pancakes and Potatoes pilgrimage out to Great Country Farms.  After a day or so of drying out atop newspapers strewn across our dining area (table, chairs, floor – no space was safe!), we put them in several paper shopping bags and have stowed them away in their own special cabinets.  If past years are any indication, we’ll have enough potatoes to last us to the new year!  And at a fraction of the price of store-bought – and much better tasting, too.  (Did you know most grocery-store potatoes are last year’s crop?  I didn’t, either, until we started venturing out to Great Country Farms every year.)

The picking process can be laborious if not for the tractor that rips out row after row for us to feast upon.  The first year we went to Great Country for the event, LeeLee and I brought our own shovels – and by “shovel” I mean “trowel” – to try our hand at unearthing our food the old-fashioned way.  Less than 10 minutes later, we found ourselves balefully eyeing the bright yellow tractor that was cheerfully ripping trails in the soil, exposing hundreds upon hundreds of potatoes in its wake.  We dropped our trowels immediately and followed along like water skiers, picking up dozens of pounds of spuds with ease.  In the years since, we’ve not even bothered bringing our own trowels along.  It’s much more fun to follow the farmers at a safe distance and glean from their hard work!

Over the years, we’ve experimented with how best to store our produce and have come up with some findings as we’ve progressed.  The first year, we stored our potatoes amid paper bags in cabinets under the kitchen counter.  This preserved them very well, but we lost a very important cabinet for the season in the process.  For the last two years, we’ve stored them in the basement in a retrofitted “root cellar” (which is in fact a portion of our laundry room).  The first year of basement storage, we used paper bags again, and the potatoes turned out just fine.  The second year, we used cardboard boxes, on the advice of The Internets, and our potatoes degraded much faster than usual – rotting before we could use them all.  Whether this was a result of the boxes or just the batch of potatoes (Did I dry them well enough?  Were there any rotten ones I missed?) is still undetermined, but I’m not about to risk a repeat performance!

So back to the kitchen, and back to paper bags, they go this year.  This time I’ve cleared out a little-used cabinet that is sure to be a perfect home for our fair spudly friends.  I’ll report back on their preservation process – and, of course, on the meals we make with them, too!  I’m thinking hash browns will be on the menu next weekend … but we’ll see.  Film at 11!

:)