Growing our potatoes

We spent all summer working to grow our potatoes. I don’t mean the edible kind you grow in the garden, but rather the muscles in your upper arms.

When my kids were younger, they were always in awe of my dad’s arms. Heck, they are still in awe. He would roll up his sleeve and twitch his biceps while saying, “Look at these potatoes.” The terminology stuck, and now, Hayes and Nash are always flexing and comparing the size of their “potatoes.”

Wanting to grow potatoes like Papa (that’s what they call my dad) takes hard work, so I use that motivation to talk my boys into all sorts of manual labor.

It was a good year for making dry hay around here, and my family still feels the need to make small square bales. So, we spent several days throughout the summer stacking piles of hay and straw in our hay shed. I haven’t seen it this full in a long time.

We probably stacked close to 5,000 small bales over the last few months, so our potatoes got plenty of work. Really, it’s a whole body workout. Who needs a gym membership around here? I am someone who enjoys lifting weights, but my regular workout routine that I do throughout much of the year goes out the window in summer. Throwing bales, sorting cattle and handling fair calves replaces my dumbbell routine just fine.

Doesn’t matter how much I work out my arms, though; my boys always tell me that Papa has the biggest muscles in the world — and they are not wrong. The man can lift and manhandle almost anything. Back in his younger years, he would compete in arm wrestling contests all the time, claiming victory quite often.

I’m hoping those genetics trickle right down to my boys. At ages 9 and 5, they should be only a few years away from being able to handle most of the heavy lifting on their own, or so I can dream.

For now, they are pulling their weight just fine. Nash prefers to help Papa unload wagons, while Hayes helps me stack on the pile. Nash crawls to the top of the wagon and works on pushing bales down to my dad to put on the conveyor. Sometimes, it takes his whole body to get the things to move. If the bales are light enough, he insists on carrying the bale himself or rolling it all the way to the wagon door and getting it onto the conveyor on his own. It certainly slows down the process at times, but you can’t grow potatoes if you aren’t working them. Nash is also constantly talking, so there is usually some comic relief with what he says while he’s working hard.

Hayes prefers the art of stacking the pile. It assembles similar to Lego structures, which he loves, so he and I usually work together to build up the pile. He’s not as ambitious as Nash, so he’s not afraid to take breaks (maybe more often than I would like him to). He’s also not a fan of heights, so once we get to the rafters, he usually finds his way down the pile to watch me finish.

School has started for the boys, but it sounds like there is still another field left to be baled. Unloading the wagons will have to wait until the weekend, as the boys will be quite disappointed if we unload without them.

After that, we will have to find something else for them to do this fall to keep their potatoes growing.

Jill is a stay-at-home mom who helps part time on her family’s 140-cow dairy farm near Forest City, Minnesota. She and her husband, Aaron, have two children: Hayes and Nash.