WINTER’S COMING: THE END OF THE OUTSIDE WORK SEASON IS NIGH. During the last couple of years the concrete interface between our underground ICF Block Potato House and the concrete slab at the garage door entry has succumbed to hard usage and had begun to break up. So with a cold week coming, yesterday was a good day to finish up this concrete repair project. A heavy-duty piece of angle iron was re-imbeded into the new concrete edge and it is temporarily held in place by two ratchet straps anchored to a forklift parked sideways and out-of-view.
Inside, this year’s big & beautiful Organic Seed Potato crop is safely put away. We ran out of big one-ton 4’x4’x4′ hardwood pallet harvest boxes and had to finish up getting the crop out with smaller and more nimble ‘Carrot’ pallet boxes which each hold a bit over half a ton.
Last week we ran 16,000 pounds of Keuka Gold (https://www.woodprairie.com/product/organic-certified-keuka-gold-seed-potatoes/) – one of our top yielding varieties – over the grading line. Besides the 700 pounds of pickout potatoes which had drowned from being located in low ground amid September’s excessive 10″ of rain, NOT ONE SINGLE TUBER HAD A SKIN BLEMISH such as Scab or Rhizoctonia. This is consistent with field observations which indicate across-the-board exceptionally high tuber quality. Caleb, Megan & Jim