How I Store 200 lbs of Potatoes WITHOUT a Root Cellar

We grew about 300 pounds of

potatoes

here on our farm this year. I love growing

potatoes

, but if you're going to grow them in quantity, you need to know how to

store

them so they don't spoil. In this video I will show you. You know exactly how we harvest our potatoes to maximize their shelf life and how we

store

them without having a basement, so I have extended my schedule as much as I can, we are at the last moment, we have to harvest the potatoes like today. The potato patch isn't far away, but we're going to have to haul a lot of potatoes and I don't want to do it by hand, so I'll take the truck there.

Wait, I'm going to recruit child labor. Can you help me harvest potatoes please, because I need all the help I can get, I'll just get what this is. Hey guys, come help me get some tools out of the greenhouse. Yes that's fine? Yeah, so I'm a little nervous. Look how they look, it was really cold last weekend, like below freezing, and there was no way I could get the potatoes out before that happened, so I hope the ones close to the surface of the soil don't get ruined , so I'll see, so this potato was out of the ground, you can see it froze and it's super soft and gross, so this was all our potato patch this year, for the first time we had lines on each side of this walkway, we did Yukon Gold. and russet and they grew very well, we just had a simple sprinkler line, a little drip system here and it was practically planted and forget it, I think this is the easiest potato crop I have ever grown, just take one, just take a bottle .

How did your face get so dirty? Let's see what we have here. We have a potato plant and you won't wait to harvest them until they dry out like this, um, which is usually put in in the fall, this is what I do. I'll leave them until it's ready and then I'll take them out a little bit to start loosening the soil, so luckily these potatoes that were underground are fine, they're nice and firm, they're just the way we want them. We'll probably lose a couple that were soft from being frozen, but I think most will be fine.

I like to use our hands as much as possible because otherwise I'm really good at stabbing potatoes with shovels and we just have to dig in there like a treasure hunt until we find oh there's one over here guys look at that big one , holy moly, there's one right there mom, there you go, good job, another one is like gold, you get it, good job, good job, okay. Look, so once we get everything we can find with our fingers and then I go in with my shovel, the ground right now is perfect for harvesting, so we had snow about a week ago, so it's a little wet but it's not muddy and it's not going to stick to the potatoes if you harvest them when everything is too wet.

Not only is it painful, but you have to be very careful that they are dry before storing them. She's even alive. She is alive. Huh, I never had to do that. I found the worm, come back to earth, there you go, so this is what you don't want to happen. I got it right, we can still use this one so we'll have to use it right away since I stabbed it. Basically, for the potato Chad, where did you get the cucumber? It's an old cucumber that's pretty gross. Okay, you can keep it, so we went to get water and I changed because it's hot, it's seven o'clock, it's 72 degrees and it's November, but anyway.

We're back at it, we have all the Yukon Gold practically harvested, now we're at the russets that were on the other side of the line, so everyone went to get their mud boots, took a little break, you guys are ready to go again new, usually. I buy seed potatoes and that's what I plant in early summer, but this year due to greed all the seed potatoes were sold out so what we did was go to the grocery store and buy bags of regular old organic potatoes. I cut them into pieces and we planted them and it worked very, very well, so we got many pounds of potatoes worth 10 dollars worth of potatoes from the supermarket.

It's not bad, we lost some to the frost, but it's not horrible and I think next year, hopefully, we'll do it. double this, but I'm happy with this for 2020. We're planning to build an old

cellar

in this spot next to the garden next year, but since it's not ready at the moment, we'll have to find another way to store. harvest this year, so the first thing you should do when storing potatoes long term is to cure them and generally people will do this by harvesting them and then placing them in a single layer in a dark place for a couple of days until A week or so, these have been on the ground for quite a while, they were very dry so I just let them sit in boxes in our store.

The school room is not an ideal place to sort potatoes, but it is cold, dirty and damp outside. and I'm too lazy to haul them to our big tent, do the sorting, and then put them away here, so if I have to mop the floor when we're done, I'm curious how many pounds we're carrying. Do you want to weigh them? Well, that's a 14-pound bridge. Go ahead and write 14 above it on the board. We will track each box. 10 14 more. Okay, it's pretty heavy at 36 pounds in that box. Okay, there are our counts. What is the grand total? 218 pounds is what you have, yes, I let you cheat and use a calculator instead of doing it by hand.

Okay, 218 pounds, we've probably already harvested and used through the end of summer and into the fall, about 50 pounds, so that's about 300. pounds of potatoes that we grew this year with just a couple bags of cheap organic potatoes. from the supermarket as a starting point, now we just have to save these babies for later in the year because I can't eat them all in the next few weeks. that wouldn't be good, most of these are pretty good because we pick out the bad ones during harvest. Oh, here's one we missed. You can see that line and there's a soft spot here.

This one was too close to the surface when our cold snap hit a couple of weeks ago, so we can probably use some of this potato right away. I would have to cut it or we can give it to the chickens, so I'll put it aside so it's in the sunlight or other light. light that makes the potatoes turn green, so sometimes if they are not covered enough with soil, that is why we have green spots and that is why it is very important that if they are stored they must be in a very, very place dark, wow, here's one I cut it with a shovel, so it needs to be put up and used quickly.

Soft. Soft. Okay, put it aside. Oh, Squishy. Oh yeah, that's soft too. We're done sorting. You have most of the soft ones. You can see here in our pile of rejects. For us, leaving potatoes in the ground over the winter and harvesting them as needed is not a good option, because we live in a place where the ground freezes and it is very cold. The good news is that we don't have to throw away. These are all ready, we just have to use them, so tonight I have a crock pot roast for dinner. I'm going to cut out the damaged portions of these guys and we'll eat them, so this unfinished part of our basement is where I keep my potatoes and onions all winter, like I said, it's not the most ideal place, it's a little over warmer than I would like, it's not humid, but it's much better than storing them upstairs where the house is much warmer if you have an unheated garage or store that doesn't freeze, that's even better, this room is completely dark one time the door is closed and the light is off, so it keeps it very, very dark, which is exactly what you want.

I would suggest storing it in cardboard boxes to avoid temptation. make plastic unless the plastic has a lot of ventilation, like if you had a plastic box, that would be fine, but a plastic tub like that wouldn't do it because potatoes need room to breathe, otherwise one day they will mold and They will become unpleasant. I would like to have it. enough of these wooden boxes to store all my potatoes in them, but I still don't have enough, it's important that no matter where you store them, in a legitimate

cellar

or in your basement, that you go through them about once a week and look for them in look if someone's sprouts are doing something bad, just take the ones that are sprouting, remove the sprouts and you can go ahead and eat them, is this good, huh, it tastes like dirt, it's not really good, this is good , tastes good like a raw potato with dirt, yes, I'm glad your gloves are clean, immune systems of steel, if you want to see the rest of the things I have hidden in my basement pantry, check out this video.