Bay Ridge CSA

News from the farm – part 8

As you’ll have seen from the weekly farm share email, we’re expecting potatoes in the share tomorrow…but only if everything goes well with the harvest today! For more information on what they’re up to at Hearty Roots right now, have a look at the update from Benjamin below:

We are hoping to include potatoes in this week’s share. It all depends on the potato digger working properly, and equipment is never as reliable as we’d like it to be!

We plant our potatoes early in the spring and then hill soil up around the plants as they grow, using hilling discs on the tractor. This makes the plants produce more potatoes, since more of the plant is underground, and prevents any potatoes near the surface from “greening” that comes from sun exposure.

There are two main pests that bother our potato plants: Colorado Potato Beetles and Leafhoppers. Colorado Potato Beetles have a predictable reproduction cycle, and it requires careful attention to keep them from getting out of control in the potato patch. Once we see adult beetles in the patch, we scout every day or two for juvenile beetle larvae. Once these ugly orange critters get to a certain stage, it’s time to treat the potato patch with Entrust, an organic biologically-based spray that is toxic to beetle larvae but non-toxic to humans. The beetle larvae are fat and lazy, sitting on the potato leaves and munching away. I’ve never actually seen one try to fly, crawl, run, or scurry – they just sit and munch – so they don’t put up much of a fight as we approach with the sprayer. Before we had a sprayer, when we were farming just a couple of acres, we would just pick the beetles off by hand and squish them – and our faces would end up red from beetle juice! I don’t miss those days.

Leafhoppers are the other major potato pest we contend with. They are tiny green bugs, quick to hop from plant to plant, just about the opposite behavior of the Colorado Potato Beetles. This year the dry weather meant more leafhoppers than usual. These bugs feed on the underside of the potato leaves and suck the fluids from the leaf, causing the leaves to develop a black “burn” around the edges. We tried spraying a purified horticultural oil on the plants to prevent the leafhoppers from feeding (it works on the eggplants) but that didn’t do much good. We could have sprayed another substance to try to knock back these bugs: a biological pesticide called Pyrethrin, derived form chyrsanthemum seeds. However, that’s a spray that we prefer not to use since it kills the beneficial insects, like ladybugs, as well as the pest insects. So the potatoes weren’t as lush as they might have been, and we’ll see when we dig them up tomorrow whether the yields have suffered from that or not.

We dig up the potatoes with a tractor-mounted digger that we bought last year in cooperation with two other farms. On each one of our farms, we all realized that we needed a mechanical potato digger to avoid the back-straining work of digging them by hand; but we also knew that we’d only need the machine a few days per year. So it seemed a great candidate for a piece of shared equipment! We each chipped in equally and we run around to one another’s farms to pick it up when we need it. It’s a pretty simple device, a thick metal blade that cuts beneath the potatoes under the soil, and then lifts them onto a metal conveyor belt that shakes off the soil and drops the potatoes onto the surface of the ground, where we collect them by hand into boxes.

Here’s hoping that all goes smoothly with potato harvest today!

Tags: Benjamin Shute, potatoes