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Potato Harvest Doubled!

Last year I had a yield of one bowl of potatoes, and this year I had a two-bowl crop.

Lefse lovers are potato lovers, and potato lovers are going to dig this: I doubled my yield this year!

The full story, however, is a bit disappointing. Last year, I planted three potatoes and got one bowl of russets. This year I planted five blue potatoes and five russets, and the yield was two bowls. The math is not good. The blue potato harvest made me blue. The potatoes were colorful little pebbles, and some of the bigger ones were the size of cherry tomatoes.

Now the russets were a different story. It was thrilling to spy a “lunker” swimming around as I turned the black dirt, and there were several of them that saved the day and made up most of the weight in my nine-pound crop.

The good yield of russets saved what could have been a pitiful potato harvest.

I had tried planting in the ground and then adding dirt above to build tiers of growing soil as the plant grew. Didn’t work too well, with just one russet producing tiers of potatoes. I will try this building up method next year, but I won’t go up as high as I did this year. And I will plant potatoes closer together.

Oh, well. Live and learn. Just as lefse got me into the Norwegian culture, potatoes are getting me into gardening. And that’s good.

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