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From Twitter, 8 September 2009 by @spcochenour -- "Harvesting potatoes. Hoping to get 1500 row feet harvested for storage today. http://twitpic.com/gzbch"

DoT’s Thot: Sometimes I wonder about the farmers and who will be growing our food in the future.  When I was a child, I had uncles and aunts and cousins who farmed back in Hawaii — growing banana, truck farming vegetables, hot-housing orchids, and even making charcoal.  Gradually that is fading away….

Potatoes Just Being Harvested

If you love potatoes or even merely consume them, haven’t you sometimes wondered about the source and the seasons?  I was onTwitter this morning and found this from @spcochenour — “Harvesting potatoes. Hoping to get 1500 row feet harvested for storage today. http://twitpic.com/gzbch“

Long ago, I remember a fellow engineer telling me about growing up in Idaho and harvesting potatoes.  He remarked that there was nothing as sweet as a potato fresh from the harvest — crunchy and sweet — that is how he described it — more like an apple….

My Garbage Can Potatoes

I’ve never really grown potatoes — only once did I try that leaky, recycled garbage can trick — more because I was curious — got tiny harvest of tiny taters.  It made me appreciate the bags and bins of potatoes I take for granted at the super market.

In the garbage can potatoes approach, you plant the little potato starters in a shallow layer of potting mix and keep adding stuff on top a layer at a time until the potato plants top the can and die off.  Finally, when you tip the can over, you can harvest potatoes that have grown out of the stems and rooted — fascinating, but I’ll leave the growing to the experts.

Better Potatoes and Review an Interesting Blog I Read for Fun and Info

Anyhow, seeing Stephen’s tweet drew me over to the picture and gave me a data point — it’s September and a farmer in Colorado is harvesting potatoes.  Something is really right when you know that.  So, here is his photo and you know how to find him on Twitter.

I also looked at his blog called Field and Table and now that I am blogging about his stuff, I can always go and look to see what’s up over there in Fort Collins.  His blog is an interesting read for us backyard gardeners.  For example, he markets heirloom tomatoes locally and grow my own, because of the scarcity and cost of those in my local market.

I used to fly out to Denver to work in Aurora periodically and would drive past the sign pointing to Fort Collins.  Now I will think of farming, too,  when I think of Fort Collins.

I don’t know Stephen (yet), but thought that some of us out there would find his stuff interesting and so I am sharing.

Aloha, DoT

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