Homemade Potato Harvester

Where Potatoes Grow

• Potatoes are tubers that grow on an underground section of stem, not on the roots of the potato plant. Home gardeners often grow potatoes by digging a hole 12 inches deep, planting the seed potato, then covering the stem of the plant when it reaches the top of the hole. As the plant grows, the stem continues to be covered with soil or in some cases straw. This method encourages potato tubers to set all along the buried stem area. A homemade potato harvester for these potatoes is simply a hand-held cultivator. It looks sort of like a fork with curved prongs. Harvesting these potatoes is a matter of removing the soil or straw with the cultivator.

When to Harvest

• Potato tubers start after the plant has blossomed. The longer the tubers are left attached to the plant and underground, the larger they'll get until they reach the full-grown size for their variety. Potatoes of any size are edible, from marble to football size. When the potato plant starts to yellow and wilt, the potatoes are as big as they're going to get. Harvesting is a delicate procedure. Potatoes are living entities that will reproduce the entire potato plant. If they're cut during the harvesting process they'll start to mold and rot. The trick is to loosen the soil and turn it, bringing the potatoes to the surface without bruising any.

Young Potatoes

• Harvest young potatoes by loosening the ground around them with a hand-held shovel. Since the soil has been mounded up around the plant it should be reasonably loose and not require much effort.

Potato Diggers

• Professional potato farmers use an attachment called a digger on their tractors. The digger has curved prongs that go into the soil and scoop up the dirt. Either the potatoes are left on top of the dirt and picked up by workers, or the potatoes are automatically sorted according to size by falling through holes in the bottom of a box in the back of the digger. Different sized potatoes fall into different boxes. Create your own homemade potato harvester by welding the prongs of several pitchforks to a bar that's then attached to a mini or compact tractor. Additional iron prongs are welded to the bar as well. The prongs of the pitchfork lift the soil and the potatoes. The soil falls through and the potatoes fall on top of the soil. You then pick up the potatoes.

Pointed Front Harvester

• This looks like a wagon with iron bars on the bottom and a pointed front. The triangle on the pointed front scoops down into the soil. The soil and potatoes are pushed into the box behind the triangle. The soil falls through the iron bars but the potatoes don't. When the wagon is full the potatoes are removed. The wagon apparatus can be pushed as you would a plow or pulled if attached to a small tractor.