SELLING POTATOES

By late January or early February, Pa was keeping an eye on the price of potatoes. Many folks, especially those without sufficient storage space, sold their potato crop for a lower price in fall. But not Pa. He knew that if he was patient and waited until later in winter, potato prices would climb a bit.

Throughout the Depression and World War II, we raised about twenty acres of potatoes as a cash crop. The sandy, acid soils of western Waushara County were good for potato growing. By adding an ample amount of cow manure to the potato fields, we were able to grow a substantial crop, especially if we had sufficient rain.

Potato growing when I was growing up was essentially all hand work, except for plowing and cultivating the field, which Pa did with Frank and Charlie, our trusty Percheron draft horses. Once the twenty-acre field was plowed and smoothed—Pa selected a different field each year, to prevent potato disease and minimize weeds—he hitched the team to our horse-drawn wooden marker, which etched four little grooves, forty inches apart, in the smooth, sandy soil. The forty-inch distance between potato rows (corn rows, too) was based on the width of the back end of a draft horse—wide enough that a horse could easily move between the rows without stepping on the crop when cultivating.

In the evenings in early April, Pa, Ma, and I cut seed potatoes into little pieces for planting. Then in mid- to late April, after the danger of hard frost had passed, Pa and a hired man—often our neighbor Weston Coombes—planted the seed potatoes. They walked along the marked rows and thrust the potato planter into the ground every couple of feet to make a hole to receive the seed, and then dropped a seed potato into the planter. Pa and Weston both carried a bag of seed potatoes slung over their shoulder, reaching in for a new seed potato again and again. The potato planter made a loud “clop” when the operator pulled it from the ground and it closed. Planting potatoes, like so many jobs on the farm, could be tedious and mind numbing, until you discovered the rhythm required. Grab a piece of seed potato from the sack over your shoulder with your left hand, thrust the potato planter into the ground with your right hand. Drop the seed potato into the planter, push the planter forward so the seed goes into the ground, remove the planter from the ground, slide your right foot over the hole to cover the potato, and move on to do it over again. The clop, clop sounds of the planter were spaced evenly, especially when experienced potato planters like Pa and Weston Coombes were doing the job.

Potatoes do not come up quickly, sometimes taking as much as ten days to two weeks to push through the soft ground. Unfortunately, weeds are quick to germinate, so before the potatoes even emerged from the ground, Pa hitched Frank and Charlie to our sulky cultivator and cultivated the marked rows. When the potato plants finally began to appear, the never-ending hoeing began. About every week, until the potato plants had grown tall enough to shade the rows, cultivating and hoeing continued. By August the potatoes were left to mature, and usually by early September the vines began to die and dry up, leaving behind little spears of brown stems to guide the potato diggers, who began their work in October.

The second week of October, our country school closed for two weeks so all the children could pick potatoes. We called the days off from school potato vacation, but it was hardly a vacation, as we spent every day from early morning until late afternoon bent over and picking potatoes, dropping them into buckets, and then dumping the full buckets into wooden bushel crates.

Pa and Weston, each carrying a six-tine barn fork, backed their way across the long potato field, each digging two rows of potatoes as they moved rhythmically along. I followed behind, picking what amounted to four rows of potatoes at a time. Every hill of potatoes dug revealed from one to ten smooth, round, white potatoes, some as large as a man’s fist, some as small as a marble. At noon we loaded the wooden crates of potatoes onto the steel-wheeled wagon pulled by Frank and Charlie, who had stood resting and waiting for us all morning. We unloaded the potatoes into the potato cellar, a small building built into the side of the hill just beyond our chicken house. The potato cellar’s lower area was for the potatoes; the upper, aboveground area was used to store machinery.

After we finished our noon meal, it was back to the potato field, and the work continued, day after day, until the entire twenty acres of potatoes were safely stored in the potato cellar or in the cellar under our farmhouse. Starting with the first cold days in fall, Pa kept a fire going in the potato cellar stove to keep the potatoes from freezing. There they would wait until Pa decided the price was adequate and it was time to haul them to the warehouse. In those days several potato warehouses stood along the railroad tracks in Wild Rose; a potato buyer, eager to buy potatoes at the lowest possible price, was associated with each warehouse. The purchased potatoes would be loaded onto rail cars and shipped to Chicago and eastern cities.

In midwinter we usually enjoyed a few days of above-freezing temperatures. Pa waited patiently for these warmer days, as he knew he could not haul potatoes the four-and-a-half-mile trip to Wild Rose on a below-zero day. When he deemed the weather warm enough, he got out the bobsled, which he used in winter for hauling loads too heavy for the Plymouth to transport. For the winter Pa moved the wagon box over to the sled from the steel-wheeled wagon; at the front of the sled he placed the sleigh coupe, which looked like a little building, with four side walls, windows, and a metal roof. The window at the front of the coupe faced the team, with a slot beneath it for the leather lines that guided the horses. A little sheet-metal stove stood in one corner of the sleigh coupe, so the teamster could be comfortable as he drove the bobsled on cold days.

With the weather warm-up, Pa, Ma, my brothers, and I spent the hours after the chores were done in the potato cellar, sorting and sacking potatoes for the trip to Wild Rose. The slightly warmer temperatures outside plus the potato cellar woodstove kept us warm enough to work there for two or three hours at a time.

Pa’s potato sorter was a wooden affair, hand cranked, with a wide metal belt with holes in it. The smaller potatoes passed through the holes and fell into a potato crate; these potatoes we saved for eating. The larger ones stayed on top of the belt and then fell into huge burlap bags. As soon as a bag was filled, Pa dragged it onto the platform scale standing nearby and weighed it. He took out a few potatoes or added a few to get the weight to 150 pounds. Then he used a six-inch-long needle with a length of binder twine passed through the eye and, with a few deft strokes, sewed shut the top of the burlap bag. We sorted, sacked, and weighed potatoes until there was enough for a bobsled load, which Pa hauled to Wild Rose the next day, and continued the process for several evenings, until the weather changed again and it was too cold for hauling. Then we would wait for the next warm spell and repeat the process until the potato bins in the potato cellar and the cellar under the house were empty, save for those we kept for planting the next spring and for our family’s use.

Sorting and sacking the potato crop in midwinter wasn’t an easy job. But it offered a welcome break from doing the regular winter chores. And it was a task that brought the entire family together on long winter evenings, sorting potatoes, talking about how school was going, and listing to Pa spin a story or two about other years and other potato crops.