Yesterday I spent half the day doing potatoes! When we picked them the dirt was wet, so I let them dry for a day and wiped as much dirt off as I could. I then placed them in boxes, trying not to stack the potatoes too much, and those that are stacked have air flow so they do not rot.
The potatoes that didn’t dry as much and stayed muddy, or have a bit of blight or something of the sort went into the sink to get washed. The potatoes I washed will get cooked.
So far we have almost 22 pounds of potatoes ready to cure so we can have them for the winter and almost 12 pounds to cook and turn into perogies. And so far this summer we have eaten 10 pounds of potatoes.
I often think about the early settlers and even those in medieval times and how they needed a garden to be able to provide vegetables through the summer and have enough during the winter months to simply survive. They did not have access to store bought food like we do today, so they had a lot of planning. They needed to decide what they were going to grow, plant those seeds, work hard through the summer to have beautiful gardens that they could eat from, and then work just as hard in the fall to harvest the garden and store as much as they could by drying, placing in the attic or root cellar to keep during the winter and even preserve and can.
How much do you need to plant to be able to have potatoes all winter long? The best way to determine how much you need to grow to feed your family is to keep a gardening journal and record what you planted (potatoes along with any other vegetables) and how much of each vegetable was planted, how many pounds you harvested and how long it lasted before you ran out. That’s what I plan on doing this year.
For potatoes, it’s recommended to plant 15 plants per person. Basically what we planted in just our garden boxes is supposedly enough for two people. Some potato varieties will yield a lot more than others. Some varieties we can harvest about 10 to 15 potatoes and some only 5 to 8 potatoes. From 6 hills, we harvested almost 33 pounds of potatoes — some varieties like Cerisa give more potatoes except they’re smaller, compared to Warba which gives less but larger.
It’s suggested to have 1/2 pound of potatoes per person per week. I’m counting 40 weeks from September to the first week of June. That would be roughly 20 pounds per person. Doesn’t sound like much to be honest. Even if it’s 1 pound per person per week, that would be 40 pounds of potatoes per person for that same time frame which still doesn’t seem like much.
During WWII rationing, each person was allotted 5 pounds of potatoes per person per week. That would be 200 pounds of potatoes per person which sounds a bit much. When we did 1940s Days, 5 pounds was enough for my family per week and sometimes we had leftover potatoes. With this, I’m guessing we would need at least 200 pounds of potatoes for my family for the whole winter.
We still have a lot of potatoes at my folks’ to harvest plus all the potatoes we are growing here on our city homestead.
I am interested in seeing how many potatoes we actually harvest this year.
I will update our potato harvest as we dig up the potatoes. I’ll break down our harvest here:
August 11 — harvested 32 pounds 13.19 ounces and of this, 21 pounds 13.9 ounces are being cured for the winter and 10 pounds 15.29 ounces will be cooked and turned into perogies.
Stay tuned to find out how much we harvest this year!!
enjoy from Our City Homestead to yours