Dear Farm Journal,

It’s time to harvest the potatoes. The battle of the potato beetle is over. The plant has run through its life cycle, and it’s time to start digging up the driveway field. Both Rufus and I are pretty pleased with our new method of mulching potatoes above ground. It makes the harvest much easier, not much digging at all, just peeling back the mulch and picking up the potatoes. However, the plants in the driveway field did not yield nearly as much as our field near the chicken coop. Our harvest today was only around 300 pounds from about 500 bed feet in the driveway, and we harvested 295 pounds from 55 bed feet in the garden near the chicken coop. I think the potato beetles hit the plants out there pretty hard and the soil is not as high quality, but it still blows my mind how vastly different the yield was. We still have the second half of the driveway field to harvest, but I highly doubt there will be much more yield further down. The potatoes we got today look beautiful though, so I am thankful for that. I wasn’t sure how they would turn out after the potato beetles were through with them.

~Joy