Potato Harvest

By June 24th many  of the potatoes had died back and some plants had been pulled by people who decided to help themselves to the harvest. The Warbas looked particularly bad. I was surprised to see them senescing before they had flowered, and I didn't expect there to be much underground. I suspected bacterial soft rot, which can be harbored in purslane, the dominant weed at the site.

I dug 8.0 kg of 'Yukon Gold,' 

9.8 kg of 'Warba,'

and 5.9 kg of 'Russian Blue.'

The Warba vines looked the worst among these three varieties, but gave the best yield. The Russian Blue vines looked the best, but gave the lowest yield.

I left the Kennebecs because the vines were still growing vigorously and none of them had been pulled by pilferers. When I returned to campus after the weekend almost all of the Kennebec vines had been pulled, too. Deep human footprints were visible throughout the Kennebec bed, and some potatoes were lying on the soil surface.

Sami dug the Kennebec bed in class this morning, and harvested another 12 kg of potatoes.

Between the four varieties, we collected 35.7 kg of potatoes over 30 square meters, equivalent to 106 hundredweight per acre.

This is almost exactly the same as the assumed yield of 10,000 pounds (100 hundredweight) per acre used as the default yield in the potato enterprise budget recently released by Ermius Afeworki and his coworkers in KPU's Institute for Sustainable Food Systems. The potato enterprise budget is part of a series of enterprise budgets designed for small-scale mixed vegetable farms selling directly to consumers.

According to Statistics Canada, BC potato farms typically yield nearly 300 hundredweight per acre (Canadian Potato Production pdf).  Our yield was low by provincial standards, but similar to the yield that other small-scale diversified farmers told us to expect. Of course, we have no way of knowing how much of our crop was pilfered before our final harvest.