We were ecstatic, of course. "There's something so spiritual about the first potato harvest," Jim remarked, as we feasted on our first crop later, along with a fresh tomato, cucumber, Swiss chard, and eggplant plucked straight from the garden. "It's like you dig down and you don't know what you're going to get."
Jim posted a photo to Facebook, and drew a series of likes. He also received one query from a friend of mine in my hometown, Muncie, Indiana, which provoked an interesting conversation.
Our friend wanted to know why we went through the work of planting potatoes and then digging them up. Why not just put them in tires or burlap sacks, or even shredded up newspapers? Potatoes aren't picky. They'll grow almost anywhere.
Mulling the query took me back two years to the first season of our experiments at Squashville. We first saw the house and land that we now own on the last day of September 2010. Maybe it was the golden color of the falling leaves or the brilliant blue sky, but we took one look at the house, the barn, and the back yard and decided that this was the house we were going to buy. As Murphy's Law would have it, Jim suffered a herniated disk about four days later, and struggled with pain as we visited several other properties for sale, had a contractor give us some estimates on repairs and improvements to the house, and finally made an offer. The offer took several months to complete, and by the time we moved in, four feet of snow blanketed the back yard. When the snow melted in April, we went outdoors to see what we had gotten ourselves into. We had a big back yard, whose dominant feature was a dirt bike track.
To make a long story short, the soil was dead. I'm not sure we even had what could be called soil. It was dust, and sand.
We didn't have the $10,000 to $15,000 that we guessed it would cost to re-landscape the yard, and I didn't want that kind of heavy machinery work anyway. Our neighbors told us that the only thing that could grow well in the backyard was squash, and rhubarb. We stared at our yard, and at the chicken coop and barn, and felt like the land had to be able to grow more than squash and rhubarb. So we decided to buy bags of topsoil and start trying to grow things in raised beds. Somewhere along the way, we learned that planting potatoes was an even better alternative because potatoes return nutrients to soil, and because potatoes need to be hilled in order to produce new spuds, the very process of planting them generate topsoil. The topsoil can be purchased in bags (which gets expensive), but what gives the topsoil lasting value is composted matter, primarily manure from animals who are primarily herbivores. This group of animals includes goats, sheep, cows, and chickens.
We found out that we could get some cow manure from a local farmer, if we could procure a dump truck. The contractor who had worked on our house to bring it up to code had a better idea: his friend, Armand, had a dump truck and good access to sheep manure. He brought over a truck load three times in the first year, each for $140. In the meantime, we also were spending quite a bit of money on topsoil. So we started thinking of ways that we could generate compost ourselves. By the end of the first season, we had saved so much food and yard waste that our compost heap resembled a beginner's ski slope in height. Over the winter, it broke down slowly and by the end of the second growing season it had become soil.
In the meantime, we were making friends with farmers who sold us beef, goat, pork and chicken at the local farmers market. They were glad to give us their animals' poop, if we were willing to scoop it up ourselves. We began visiting their farms three to four times a year, armed with a box of heavy-duty contractor bags. We figured out that our car could hold about 200 pounds of manure so we would sometimes make two or three trip in a week. It was a stinky, smelly endeavor, but the manure was free.
In the first two years that we planted potatoes, we spent several hundred dollars. The work -- which Jim did the bulk of -- was laborious and intensive. He would do it knowing that the soil would eventually rebound and become healthy on its own.
This year, we didn't have to buy topsoil. We had procured enough goat and cow manure, gotten fertilizer from our chickens' manure, and created enough composted matter to plant and hill potatoes on our own. In our first year, about nine pounds of seed potatoes yielded some 70 pounds of potatoes. Last year, our second year, we planted about 25 pounds of seed potatoes. Our yields were lower because of a drought, but we still ended up with enough potatoes to feed us through April as well as enough leftover spuds to plant this year.
In the meantime, we also were building relationships with local farmers who, once they started to realize that we were serious, began sharing advice and tips on how and when to plant, techniques of hilling, and long-term storage.
We had read that you could plant potatoes in tires, trash cans, old newspapers, and burlap sacks. We chose the harder path of digging into the ground and then hilling the potatoes because we wanted to replenish the soil.
Our short-term goals are to grow potatoes that we can either eat, give as gifts or use to generate seed for the following year Our long-term goals are to create topsoil. Doing it as we're doing it is hard. At the same time, nothing can replace the spiritual sensation of driving spade into soil -- soil that we've created ourselves -- and emerging with a mess of new, pale yellow potatoes.
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