by Karin Breuer

Created on: May 15, 2009   Last Updated: October 26, 2009

The Great Potato Harvest

Teenagers like eating. They do not like the work associated with growing the food. I was no exception. Mom and dad were building a house for the family and while the property had been cleared a number of years before my parents bought it, it had never been cultivated. We had moved into the half-finished house just before Christmas when the snow was deep and the yard was perfect for play but now it was spring. The snow had melted, the yard looked a mess.

Each day, after school my siblings and I helped clearing, what in our eyes was now an impossibly huge piece of property, of brambles and aspen saplings that had self-seeded since the land was first cleared. Like most kids, we felt very hard done by and completely ignored the fact that our parents were there working right beside us. We also ignored the fact that on Saturdays they were still working while we had the day off to go to a matinee and hang out with our friends at the local caf.

As the clearing progressed dad would till the soil with a roto-tiller and mom would rake it smooth. By late spring the half acre was ready for planting. Dad decided that because the soil was so heavy and probably lacked a lot of nutrients for growing much of anything that the largest part of the property would be given over to growing potatoes while the smaller strip would be further cultivated with manure and well-rotted straw from farms outside of town to provide us with lettuce, peas and strawberries.

Mom seeded the small garden and dad made the furrows where we were shown how to plant potatoes. Not a big deal, we thought. Cut the potatoes so that each piece had an eye, put the eye facing the sky, cover it up with soil so it makes a little mound. We stood back and admired our handy-work. The rows were two feet apart and every two feet a little mound of soil. It looked like a miniature mogul run laid flat. O.K. let them grow. We were finished!

Several weeks later we were to learn that we weren't finished. Each time the potato grew a shoot to about 2 above ground, we would have to mound the soil over it again. Dad said it increased the amount of potatoes that would grow. It was mid summer before dad decided that the potatoes could now develop large lush bushes and except for the occasional hoeing and keeping the weeds at bay, the rest of the summer was ours.

It was late September when dad said that the potatoes were ready for harvesting. We went out to watch him dig carefully

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