How to Harvest and Store Potatoes So They Last for Months

today's video is sponsored by black gold compost company i want to thank the good people over at black gold for the generous domain donation of all this beautiful black cow cow manure that we use in our video today and it's made a tremendous success in our garden i've been using black cow for many years ever since 1980 and it's always made a tremendous difference in my garden and i've been very pleased with our product i highly recommend it thank you black gold for sponsoring our channel well good morning friends today's video is going to be on how to harvest container grown potatoes and how to cure them for long-term storage we'll be right back after the break [Music] so [Music] well welcome back friends i've had a lot of questions on how do you cure your potatoes for long-term storage and really is a very simple process so today i thought what we would do is just start us a couple of 20 tub 20 gallon tub containers of yukon gold i got my little sign up here i planted them today on march the 18th they should be ready to harvest right around the end of july so we'll be uh coming back to you as soon as these are ready to harvest and we'll harvest them together because everybody just seems to love the uh the the process of harvesting them dumping them out and picking them out it's like looking for easter eggs but we'll watch that part of the process on harvesting the taters and then we'll we'll go over to the pantry and um we'll get them in set for curing and get them set up for long-term storage so we'll be back you know at the end of july and uh we'll get these out of the tubs and we'll get them cured for long-term storage see in a few months well our two tubs of yukon goals are definitely in late stage five so i would say today's a good day to pick these out um we got two more weeks of rain predicted starting in the morning and i mean it's straight through right off the whole 10 10 day forecast nothing but rain so we want to go ahead and get these harvested out and um we want to show you how to secure these and get them up for long-term storage that was the whole reason for this video so i thought we would uh just get these things out of the tubs and get them over there and get them drying out before we go over to the four week pantry so let's get these things on to the the mat here and see if we can't uh get these things out of the tubs okay first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to get these long stems off of here get them out of my way and i like to leave a a long stem on so i can help me uh shake them later as i'm harvesting so there we go we got those off let's pull a tub off okay well i think we're ready to dump them out and see what we get got it okay yep let's see what we got wow that about it yep i think that's about it not exactly the best harvest i've ever had but anyway it's really not to show off the best harvest we can possibly do we're just trying to help you learn how to do this process anyway that's about it i mean it ain't much to look at but it'll help us get the point across so let's go go over to the harvest area and i'll show you the next step here's our little and i mean little harvest what i'm doing is i'm setting these potatoes out here on this harvest uh this um wash table so they can get plenty of air now i didn't brush off any of the dirt i just left the dirt right on there just as it came out of the ground and i'm going to let this dry out here in the air all day today and then this afternoon i'll come back and i will lightly rinse off some of this dirt and then i'll let it dry out again and then we'll take it over and put it into four week pantry inside of our tater tower so we'll be back this afternoon okay our potatoes have been sitting out here on the wash table for about five hours now um i wanted to point out that this has been in the shade almost all day except for just just in the last 30 minutes the sun started to get into a point where it can come through the trees here but wherever you put your potatoes out to dry off like this make sure you got them in the shade now there's two ways to do this and the preferred way is not to use any water at all however if you've got some potatoes that are really muddy and really wet and just really gnarly looking when you got them out of the ground it ain't going to hurt nothing to spray them lightly with a light coat of water and kind of rinse them off a little bit and then let them sit out here and dry mine were not that bad so i didn't really rinse them off of what i'm gonna do now is as you can see they have dried and all i do is i take a soft dry rag and i come up to the potato and i just brush it off real easy and that potato now is pretty clean and it's pretty ready for dried dry stores let me show you one of those up close i just simply take a potato as you can see it's a little dirty i take my rag and i just wipe it on the rag and i'm not wiping very hard i'm just doing that very lightly i'm lightly brushing it because remember these skins are pretty soft see what i just did i accidentally pulled that one a little too hard and peeled it but anyway you want to just clean it up just a little bit let me show you another one here's a before and you don't have to get these things perfectly clean you're just wanting to get the loose most of the loose stuff off of them so when you put them into your storage cabinet and everything you just don't get it all real filthy dirty see that's good enough because when you get ready to eat that potato you're gonna wash it off anyway and most likely you're gonna peel it okay but see that's that's pretty dry and pretty clean okay let me get the rest of these brushed off and then we'll head over to the four week pantry and we'll put these in our tater tower so we can store them for long term well here we are over at the four week pantry and this is my tater tower and i'm sure you remember uh seeing this on our video on our uh four week pantry that we built we built this and if you want to build something like this these uh the the construction sketches on how to build this or on that video go check that out four week pantry but what it is is it's a simple roll out drawers and there's plenty of ventilation in here in between the drawers and uh that's that's important i've got no direct light in this room i've got this window right here but there's no direct light coming through there and it's inside inside the tower so no light really hits the potatoes because you don't want that because if you do they're just going to turn green on you so anyway i take the potatoes here's all the potatoes we just got through brushing off and all i do is put them right in my tower and i spread them out so they're really not touching each other and i've already got some more yukon goals in there that i'm uh allowing to chit so they're doing pretty well in here so all the potatoes inside this first drawer right here are yukon golds and what i'm going to do with these since i have so such a small amount of them is i'm just saving these for next year and let them chit and um for next spring and then we'll use them for seed potatoes so come on up here and take a look at it up inside okay here's all my potatoes in the drawer as you can see i've separated them out where they're really not touching each other i've got some paper towels on the bottom just in case i uh come back in here and check on these in a week or two i look for any wet spots in here for some potatoes that just ain't gonna make it if i see any that's wet and they're starting to rot i get them out of there so it doesn't ruin the rest of them but all these over here these have been in here for a while they're starting to chit already and these are brand new we just put these in here today so they're set and we'll be looking forward to using these for seed potatoes next spring there they all are tucked away into the tater tower so um these potatoes right now will last in this tater tower in here this is a cool environment it's air conditioned inside my uh pantry uh we keep the lights off in here all the time the only light is coming through this window and it doesn't go directly into the tater tower so it's cool so the air is cool the the space is ventilated and uh it's dark so that's what we want to do to maintain our potatoes for long-term storage these potatoes will last three four months in here and they're completely edible you can come back and just get them out and take them in wash them off and peel them eat them and make you some good old mashed potatoes so anyway i hope this helps you on what to do with your potatoes after you harvest them these yukon gold potatoes will be here next spring waiting on me if we don't eat them before then so anyway i thank you for watching i hope this video helps you we want to thank the lord for everything he gives us especially seed potatoes so until me and nancy see you next time always remember buys hands we are fed give us lord our daily bread amen [Music] so [Music] foreign

Channel: Hollis and Nancys Homestead

Views: 77,229

Keywords: how to prepare potatoes for long term storage, potato storage, storage potatoes, potatoes, hollisandnancyshomestead, food storage, long term storage of food, food, save potato harvest, storing potatoes that lasts for months, save your food, harvesting and storing potatoes

Id: UwEHYzL8j60

Length: 12min 12sec (732 seconds)

Published: Thu May 26 2022