To our friends in Big Sandy and the surrounding community:
Last July we had our grand opening which many of you attended. A lot has happened at the Quinn Institute since then. We enjoyed a wonderful growing season compared to the last four years of drought and grasshoppers and now the last of the harvest is winding down and all the winter wheat trials are planted. Our last big event for the year was our potato harvest. We were fortunate enough to have our good friends from the Greycliff community join us bringing their team of Percheron draft horses and horse drawn potato digger. They were digging bright and early Thursday morning, October 10th when two busloads of children from the Big Sandy Elementary School pulled up. The children, kindergarten through 6th grade, were able to watch the horses pull the digger and see the potatoes popping out of the ground. KRTV was also on hand to record the festive sight and will prepare a summary of the whole event for the evening news.
After a group orientation, and a short question and answer session, the children set out picking up potatoes and putting them in white crates strung along ten 350-foot rows. There were 20 rows in all. We could only dig every other row at a time because the potatoes had to be gathered and removed before the next row was dug to keep the horses from walking on the fresh dug potatoes. The children finished picking up the first half of the potatoes in less than a half hour and then took the bus a mile to the west to see Charlie Overbay's colored corn field while the remaining adults, including a couple friends from Rocky Boy, dug and picked up the second half of the potatoes. By the end of the morning all the children were heading back to town with a potato and a cob of corn to take home for all their efforts. A very fun time was had by all.
The potato harvest went very well this year. We had four varieties, Huckleberry Gold (purported to be good for diabetics due to its high percent of resistant starch), Red Norland (our favorite to enjoy as new potatoes in July), Purple Viking and Arizona Gold. The varieties differ in the length of their growing season. The Red Norland vines, our earliest potato, have been dead for nearly a month, while the Huckleberry Gold dried up about two weeks ago. The Purple Viking were about ½ dried up while the Arizona Gold were still growing like crazy and would have continued to grow until the first killing frost had we not dug them. There was a huge variation in yield that correlated somewhat with the growing time. The Huckleberry Gold (purple skin/yellow flesh) was our poorest yielder at only about 0.6 pounds per hill. Red Norland (red skin/white flesh) and Purple Viking (red and purple skin/white flesh) both yielded about 1.6 pounds per hill. The Arizona Gold was by far the most productive at 3.3 pounds per hill. They especially took advantage of our August and September rains and longer than usual growing season. During years with typical weather, a drier, hotter August and a normal first frost event in September, these four varieties will yield much closer to the same. When we experience a very short season, however, the yield results will be in nearly reversed from what we saw this year. This is one of the main reasons we plant more than one variety as some do better with a short season while others do better in a long season, and we never know what we might expect. Also for some reason the very hot and dry July seemed to effect the Huckleberry Golds more than the others.
We harvested a total of 3,760 pounds and now have them all safely stored in our root cellar. Three quarters of those potatoes are destined for the Big Sandy School lunch program. In this way the students eating potatoes at lunch will have the satisfaction of knowing they were part of the harvest of these potatoes and therefore contributed to having the potatoes on their plates. Thus, local potatoes will be added to the local meat being provided by the Pioneer Producer's Program which is also just launching this year, thanks to the generosity and hard work of many in this community.
The mission and vision of the Quinn Institute (QI) is "Healing the Earth by Growing Food as Medicine." The three major goals of the QI are regenerative organic agricultural research, education and health. In all those areas we hope to involve our community as much as possible. The potato harvest was mostly focused on education. We want our children to understand where their food comes from and even participate in its production (in this case the harvest). In future years we plan to add further education opportunities with field days and seminars for those with farms and ranches as well as hands on gardening, planting and pruning fruit trees, and home processing and preserving of food experiences for everyone who eats and would like to provide themselves with some of their own food.
Watch for our semi-monthly series in the Mountaineer where we will continue to report on our activities
