It’s a rare person who agrees to give their Saturday to a friend to give them a hand. Rarer still may be the one who brings the whole family to get down in the dirt and do the heavy lifting on the farm. After all, we’re all busy people. There’s shopping to be done, cleaning at home and on occasion, we might even want to just rest up and recover from the onslaught of the world. I know I would love to catch an afternoon catnap, preferably undisturbed by my two perfectly behaved cherubs… But alas, there is always more work to be done around the farm.

For this farmer, that work was the digging of the annual spuds. We grew a quarter acre of red Pontiacs and another quarter or so of white Kennebecs. My goal for this year is to try making some kettle chips from our harvest in addition to obviously putting up a fair bit for the family to eat. But to make chips, one first needs some healthy potatoes.

After a tough year for many crops, I wasn’t entirely sure how ours were going to look. There was a late summer windstorm that flattened our plants. I got behind and never hilled them as much as I wanted to, and on top of that they were overgrown with weeds and nibbled heavily upon by deer. DEER! I’ve never seen deer eat potato plants like I have this year. Even still, I held out hope that our potatoes would yield something for our efforts.

So out came the tractor and potato digger and I began to scratch into our patch to see what could be seen.

I had a rough go at first, trying to get the digger dialed in to turn up the spuds at just the right angle without causing my antiquated digger to lock up. I found myself fixing the chains not once, but three separate times throughout the day after encountering rocks and large clumps that didn’t agree with the regular mastication of the machine.

It was during one of these breakdowns that my friends arrived to give me a hand picking up all the potatoes that had been dug. It was a big deal to me, because although I have had help from family in the past to do the potatoes and garlic—among other chores—I had yet to have any friends ready to roll up their sleeves and get right into this whole farming thing. That and if I did have help, it was normally only one or two people at a time.

Well, that changed when the Henrys rolled up with their three boys and two parents strong. That, combined with my mother and my two boys, made it technically eight helpers besides myself.

While I had a bit of a head start digging potatoes with the tractor, it wasn’t long before they had me caught and I spent the rest of our time digging one or two rows ahead of them as the feed sacks quickly filled. By the time we were done, we had roughly a thousand pounds, nearly 10 times the seed we initially planted. We even found a whole six onions of the eight hundred or so I had planted at the top of the patch. I’m not the same kind of onion farmer as I am a potato farmer, but hey, I’ve got room for improvement.

With the field picked clean, I got a little ambitious and quickly turned the field over to plant garlic. I no sooner got the plastic mulch layer mounted and started into the field when my luck fell apart again, along with the power steering pump on the tractor. It made for a disappointing but acceptable stopping point that day and allowed us to visit for a spell before running out of daylight.

The way out here, friends are worth their weight in potatoes and then some. What’s a more expensive crop than potatoes? Sweet corn? Hmmm, I should see what they’re doing around July next year… Aside from the work though, it made for a happy day to watch my friend’s kids running around with mine. I never felt like our small farm was ever so alive as when all those kids were climbing trees and throwing cut potatoes around and playing tag while the harvest went on in the background. If half of our days could have the same level of productivity and playfulness, I’d die a rich and happy man. A huge thank you to Kally and Kyle for spending the day with us and getting the crop in on one of the last fair-weather days this year.