As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
It occurs to me that most Americans need a lesson in survival in potatoes. For most people, their knowledge of potatoes is they come in plastic and either they rot and you buy more, or you chip the ice off the tater tots.
It might help some millennials that tater tots and french fries do not grow in fields.
Potatoes in harvest are notorious for finding a way for you to stab with a fork the biggest potato. And a potato fork is not a table fork, so do no dig them with the silverware.
There is a process in potatoes in you dig them, but they must be "cured", as in dried so their skin toughens, and you dry them, so they do not rot in storage.
Do not allow potatoes to freeze or they rot and that destroys your seed. Do not let them be in light or they turn green. Do not put them in a warm area, or they will sprout and rot.
OK so you let your potatoes cure in a warm sun for a few hours.
Now you sort them. Sorting is your world of tomorrow.
You will have three buckets.
Bucket one gets your best potatoes for planting. Forget the bullshit about hen size egg potatoes or they will potato out in small crops. Plant not your biggest, but the next size down which are your large, well shaped, and blemish free.......or they rot. You can use the green topped ones as most will keep and you would waste cutting them off any way.
Bucket two gets the small ones, which you can Irish steam for nice fresh baby potatoes.
Bucket three through infinity are your eating potatoes, so that you can dig into them with glee and not be sorting later and forget you ate your planting potatoes.
In a lovely world you have a root cellar. In mine I have a porch that is in most cases unheated.
I have written previously about heirlooms, but this is not about wonderful flavored gourmet potatoes. This is about something to eat in survival. So the Americans have two potatoes that produce and keep, Purple Viking and Yukon Gold. Gold needs more water to get size, but if you feed and care for these two, they will make you food. They are short to mid season.....meaning a long season potato will not start making potatoes until August, and in most places in America, it is hot and dry in August, and that means you are going to be watering long season potatoes, and find potato bugs eating things, which means pesticide, so do yourself a favor in mid season potatoes. Early potatoes do not produce a great deal either, and you will discover you will lose your potatoes in fall digging as the plants dry up and disappear.
OK that is about the bug and the boo, of potatoes. In the real world in planting, you need to dig deep and have a trench and cover things up as they grow........inch of water a week, but unless you shit money which I do not, you hope for a deep till and leave it at planting in a semi straight row, as digging that trench would probably give you a heart attack.
If you got a roto tiller or tractor, then do it right, otherwise to what you can right with drying the spuds so they keep in an unheated basement.
If you get those damn little flies, and it smells like a sewer, you got rotten potatoes.....don't wait for the potato wine though or vodka to distill as it tastes like dirt I figure or like hog shit.
Any way that is your prepper million dollar post to fatten you up for the wolves. At least something is going to eat meat and enjoy it.
agtG
