As promised, I do have some results for our potato harvest this year. However, it’s not quite the stats that I thought I’d have for you.

We grow potatoes every year. Some years are great, some years are not so great, and some years there’s hardly anything. This year I had an experiment going. Half my potatoes were covered with black plastic, half were not.

The black plastic helps to heat up our soil, which helps us grow produce, because here in Alaska, the soil temperatures are very cold, even in the summer. Down just 10-12 inches (25 cm), the soil temperatures range from freezing to around 40 degrees F (4 C).

I have harvested 2 full rows from the uncovered area. I started harvesting them the end of July up until last week when we started harvesting the covered rows. Those 2 full rows of uncovered potatoes provided about 30 pounds of potatoes, less than 3/4 pound per plant. That is not a great harvest as there are approximately 23 potatoes planted per row, and the average potato yield would be 3-7 pounds per seed, depending on variety.

If we’d have gotten even the smallest harvest, we’d have gotten around 50 pounds per row. On a really good year we get around 5 pounds per seed. These 2 rows produced less than 1 pound per plant. Now, it was early, so I wasn’t expecting big baking potatoes, but I thought there’d have been more than that.

Last week we started digging up the covered potatoes. We had 7 rows of covered potatoes to dig and 7 remaining rows of uncovered potatoes. I had to start off by cutting off all the vines so that I could remove the plastic whole. It’s pretty heavy duty plastic, so I wanted to be able to save it for next year.

I dug up the first row by myself. Wow, what a huge difference. We went from not quite even a pound per plant to almost 6 pounds per plant. The first row had 145 pounds of potatoes in it.

Each successive covered row filled 3 wooden crates per row, each crate holding between 45 and 50 pounds of potatoes. That gave us a total of around 950 pounds of potatoes in just 7 rows! That is a record for us.

My husband and I were digging the potatoes by ourselves this year and it took us 2 days to finish up the covered potatoes. With so many potatoes, and way more than we could possibly eat before next year, we decided not to dig up most of the other potatoes ourselves.

But, just for fun, we did dig up several plants just to see what was there. The potatoes were quite a bit bigger than they had been, going from golf ball size to a small baseball size. But, there were still only 2 or 3 potatoes per plant, compared to the 6-8 and sometimes 10 large baking size potatoes from the covered area.

That would mean the harvest was more than double in the covered area compared to the uncovered area. And, there were more rows of uncovered potatoes than covered. This completed my unintentional experiment. This was enough for my husband to want to invest in more black garden plastic for next year.

So, what to do with the remaining potatoes? We have a number of friends who didn’t grow a garden or couldn’t. They jumped at the opportunity to come and dig up the remaining potato plants. We did plant some red ones that did pretty well even uncovered (still 2 or 3 but they were just a bit bigger than a baseball), and my husband wants some of those, so I think we’ll probably swap out, if they want, some variety when they have as many pounds as they wanted to dig.

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