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market-farming - Re: [Market-farming] potato digger advice

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  • From: "MAsteveINE" <MAsteveINE AT 207me.com>
  • To: "Market Farming" <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] potato digger advice
  • Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2010 09:42:34 -0400

There was a time when the item in the USA most patented was the butter churn, I have always thought that the second place must have been the potato digger. (Google image potato digger, potato harvester, and potato windrower  some evening)
 
 
Hoover digger;
 
 
 
Note the front wheels, as soon as a tractor was available they went to the dump, and as soom as someone wrecked their Model A Ford the transmission and rear end was used to convert to
PTO.
 
(My neighbors were out recently with  a windrower moving 4 rows  right and left to the spaces between
other rows so that the harvester was loading 10 rows in a trip across the field. AC in the tractors,
AC in the trucks, ...........life is good...............)
 
Consider that a good team of horses steps right along when under load, fast enough that small
boys had to run to keep up wjth a mower, plow or the potato digger.
 
As you guys have noted, weeds and vines are a factor, soil type and moisture are too, and it all
means keeping an eye to the digger so that idealy it is carrying some soil almost to the top of the
bed to cushion the crop, but getting rid of enough soil so that picking up the crop does not involve pawing about in the dirt.
 
Storage potatoes should have a couple of weeks in the ground after the vines are dead in order to "set" the skins and harden them up. The old timers could wait for natural death, with todays demand for early potatoes, vines are killed with herbicide, or they are done mechanicly usually with a rotobeater,
(like a flail mower with just the chains and no knives.)
 
Advice:  Find what we called a barrel harvester, a one row affair which extended the digger bed
to a working height  conveyor where 2 people seperated the trash from potatoes which went into a barrel or fork lift box. Life is too damn short to bend over and pick up anything that can be moved by machine that easily.
 
 
MAsteveINE
 
 



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