Mounding Potatoes?

So here is the deal.  With this farming thing I am learning something new every day.  Some days I learn several new things.  I would never have admitted this when I was a teen but I love learning even at 58 when you think you know everything.  The difference between crochity 58 year olds and 14 year old "know it alls" is that 58 year olds forget what they know faster than they know it.  Enough for the tangent.

So yesterday Josh hooked up this small disk apparatus on the back of my tractor.  Big tractors have disk things that cover 15 feet at a time.  We are a small farm so ours was just two feet.  He instructed me to drive the tractor dead center over our potato plants (which are growing very well) with the disks on either side of the plants. The disks pushed dirt up to and nearly covering the nice green plants.  The task would have been a lot easier had Josh planted the potatoes in a straight line. It was easy to center the front of the tractor over the plant but the disk was 8 feet behind the front and he constantly barked commands to me to "go left" or "hard to the right".  We are going to work on straight planting for next year.

Ok so it makes sense that you mound the potatoes. They grow underground and no one cares about the leafy plant above the surface.  I did not know but kinda figured that potatoes have a leafy stem above the surface.  How else would you know where to dig?  It also makes sense to nearly bury the plant under a mound so that the root vegetable can grow and is easy to harvest.  All very understandable but still new to me but I did not know what the disk thingys actually did
until yesterday.  Another new thing I learned.

The big revelation came from Josh.  I am amazed on how much he knows but I want my readers to do some research on this fact.  He told me that Potatoes that get exposed to sunlight can turn green and become poisonous.  Really!  I asked him twice if this is true and he emphatically said yes.  Potatoes can be poisonous?  How many Irish people had to learn that lesson the hard way.  If any of my readers can refute this information I would like to hear from you.  Josh is a graduate of West Virginia after all so we can't take this information totally on his word alone. He knows a lot mind you but I do not want my blog to be like Wikipedia.