Potato Treasure Hunt!

Roasting and eating your potato harvest and preparing the summer garden

June marks the transition from spring to summer, which comes rapidly and with force in the Sacramento Valley. Temperatures jump from the seventies to three digits, seemingly overnight. 

Each year at Peregrine School we grow seed potatoes in “bags” in February so that they can be harvested just before school closes in June. Our final garden class for all grades is “the great potato roast”, in which we dig up, wash, cut, season, and roast potatoes in foil on hot coals. Roasted with butter and salt, the freshly dug potatoes are delicious! 

To harvest potatoes, kids overturn the potato bags on the ground and hunt through the dirt to see what has grown. 

Digging for potatoes is like a treasure hunt! The potato bags make it easy to find them all, but potatoes can of course be planted in the ground as well. 

Once they are dug and washed, we cut them up and place them in a double foil wrap with butter and salt. Cut into one inch chunks, they cook on the fire in less than one half hour, then can be unwrapped on a plate and devoured. 

The digging of potatoes marks the end of the winter garden. The summer garden should be already planted, but can be filled in with last minute plants. One of our summer favorites is a Three Sisters Garden plot, which follows a Native American legend about three sisters: corn, beans and squash. These plants are called “sisters” because they help each other to grow.