We’ve wrapped up another big harvest here, potatoes! So, let’s talk about what we do to prepare those potatoes for long term storage!
Just like with our onions, potatoes need to go through a curing process. It’s essentially identical, where we lay the potatoes out in a single layer and allow them to dry for a couple of weeks. This induces dormancy and also dries them out slightly, helping to avoid spoilage. Again, good air exchange is something you’re looking for here and we prefer to do this indoors to avoid severe temperature fluctuation. Oh, and don’t wash your potatoes until you use them as that thin soil layer provides protective properties!
Unlike with onions, an important thing during the curing process is to cover those potatoes with an opaque material. Light, even indirect light, can cause the potato to turn slightly green, which is an indication the potato has produced solanine. This is a toxic compound that can cause sickness in humans when consumed in high quantities. If you have a dark room, that’ll do too, but we just cover our crop with some towels or blankets and it works well enough.
Once your potatoes have cured, you definitely want to separate any damaged potatoes. This might be potatoes that were injured during the harvest process or in some other way. These damaged potatoes are perfectly good to eat, but you’ll want to consume them relatively soon as they’re highly likely to spoil.
As for long term storage, there are “right ways” and then there’s ways that work. In an ideal world, we’d store our potatoes at a relatively cool 50 degrees. For us, without a root cellar, that’s not going to happen. So, we store our potatoes in the coolest room of our house. We do see slightly degraded storage times, but we’re still able to get many months of storage time.
Just like during the curing process, your storage method should promote a bit of airflow and also eliminate light as much as possible. We generally store our potatoes in a Rubbermaid container with some holes drilled in the lid, placed underneath our guest bed. We’ll demonstrate our storage methods a bit later, once we put them up.
As for expectations, if you hit perfect storage temperatures, your potatoes will last you well into next year before they start sprouting again. With slightly below room temperatures, we can usually get to December or January before we see sprouting. We further preserve any remaining potatoes in December for this reason.
Oh, and don’t forget to reserve some of your potatoes for next year’s seed stock! By planting season, your potatoes will be growing eyes or full on shoots. We try to reserve the largest potatoes that we grew for seed stock as this will promote larger, healthier genetics. As you can see, we grew some serious chonkers this season and that’s aided by our curated selection for our seed stock.
We’re looking forward to eating these up! We saw a greatly diminished white potato harvest this year, but our reds did great. We’re intending to replace our white potato seed stock next year as the genetics we got a couple years ago just aren’t doing it for us.
