Planting potatoes

I'm slowly getting various things planted in the garden, notably the cool-weather stuff that can handle spring temperatures. Last week I planted potatoes.

Unlike last year, when I planted eight beds and harvested 230 pounds of potatoes, I'm limiting our potatoes this year to just three beds. That's because we are still swimming in potatoes and don't need eight more beds' worth.

I had already layered compost on the beds from a couple weeks earlier, so all I had to do was turn it over (which takes just a couple of minutes per bed).

Lots and lots of worms, always a nice thing to see.

 

 

Now let's briefly digress to last October, when I harvested all the potatoes from last summer's garden. We ended up storing them in burlap bags in the "cool room," a small unheated room Don built off our bedroom as extra storage space.

 

We were pressed into using this space as an impromptu root cellar, and to be honest it's worked out amazingly well. In previous years, without a dedicated place to store potatoes over the winter, they were ridiculously overgrown by April – fine for planting, but not for eating.

But last year's potatoes – and remember, we still have lots – are still in excellent shape, even after six months in storage.

For planting, I brought out the burlap sack that contained the smallest potatoes, which I used as seed potatoes.

I arranged three rows of seven potatoes each, for a total of 21 potatoes per bed, or 63 total potatoes.

Using a trowel, it doesn't take long to bury each potato deeply.

That's as far as I got last week, and ever since then we've been dodging some fairly major rainstorms.

With more rain on the way, the one thing I hadn't yet done was put straw mulch on the beds.

Mulching takes no time at all.

Mr. Darcy supervised the process.

Except for a little light weeding (notably, of the volunteer wheat that will grow from the wheat-straw mulch) – and watering, of course – that's all I'll need to do to the potatoes until October, when I'll harvest them.

It's a good thing I got the mulching done when I did, since we had a dramatic bit of rain move through today.

Planting broccoli

For three days this week, we've experienced unnaturally warm March weather, with temperatures in the mid to high 70sF.

This was nothing short of a siren call to get things done in the garden, especially since we had a block of rain and cooler temperatures moving in.

One of the advantages of having the garden fully fenced against deer (at last!) is we can plant with abandon and not worry about things getting picked off all the time.

So I spent a couple of days weeding, topping the beds with compost, raking up last year's leaves, etc. Then it came over me like a thunderclap that it's the ideal time to plant my hands-down all-time favorite vegetable, broccoli.

We really don't have room in the house to do much by way of vegetable starts, so I decided to take a chance and direct-sow them into the garden beds.

But not without a little prep. First, using some of the compost Don brought up a few weeks ago...

...I put a fresh layer on each bed.

Then I dug it in and raked it smooth.

Time to break out the seeds.

Years ago, I got these silly and inexpensive seed spoons that can pluck out tiny seeds of various sizes. I tell ya, these have proven to be worth their weight in gold.

I prepped three beds for broccoli, with plans to plant six seeds per bed in a zigzag formation. To decide on the right pattern and spacing, I stuck a few small sticks in the beds.

Planting eighteen seeds took just a few minutes.

(For those claiming that 18 broccoli plants are too many, you don't understand just how much I love broccoli. I might even plant a couple more beds as well.)

I pulled in some fresh straw for mulch.

Here are all three beds, planted and mulched.

Ah, but I'm not finished. Notice the pile of long white poles on the ground?

Last June, you might recall, I put up a blog post entitled "The Argument for Buying Ahead." Take a moment and go back to read it. Go on, I'll wait.

Now that you're back, I'll explain. Those poles are seven-foot fiberglass poles purchased back when we had money to be used for cloching garden beds. We bought enough to cloche every single bed if necessary.

Unfortunately, these poles turned out not to be the best choice. Bending them is juuuuust a bit more than the fiberglass fibers can handle, and quite often (but not always) they break. If we could do it over again, I would recommend half-inch pex tubing as a nonbreakable cloching alternative. However, since we have so many fiberglass poles, I'll continue to use them and just replace broken ones as needed.

Anyway, my plan was to cloche the broccoli beds even before the plants sprouted. Each bed takes four poles: One at either end, and two in the middle. I start by lining them up on one side of each bed.

Then it's a simple matter to bend the poles and tuck them into the other side of the bed. Since these poles are fiberglass, gloves are critical so I don't get tiny glass shards in my hands.

But what to cloche the beds with? Ah, that was another purchase we made during our "purchasing ahead days" – garden netting. I purchased a bulk amount of seven-foot-wide netting, enough to cloche every single garden bed if necessary.

This was the first time I've had the opportunity to use it. The first thing I did was measure how much each bed required.

Eight-foot beds, two-foot-high cloche hoops, and enough netting to drape generously down each end came out to fourteen feet of netting for each bed.

So I laid out the measuring tape on the porch to fourteen feet in length.

Then I measured out the netting and cut it to length, repeating this step for the three beds.

This draped beautifully over the poles and thoroughly cloched each bed.

I staked the netting down with U-stakes, yet another one of our "buy ahead" purchases a few years ago. We bought a box of 5,000 of these babies and use them all the time.

The stakes puncture through the netting easily. This also might mean it will tear holes in the netting after a while, so I'll have to be vigilant for this possibility.

This is what the broccoli beds looked like when I was finished, all cloched and staked.

Why did I cloche the broccoli at all? It's because broccoli (as well as other cruciferous crops) are highly susceptible to flea beetles and aphids, both of which can decimate plants within days. I speak from experience. It's painful to watch my favorite veggie get eaten down before I have a chance to harvest a single bit of it.

These are flea beetles, tiny jumping beetles that can turn a healthy plant into a lacy skeleton of its former self in a matter of days.

A few years ago, I was watching a gardening video by an Australian gardener who said that 90 percent of gardening pests in raised beds could be controlled or eliminated with the judicious use of net cloches. That was enough for me (in those heady days of having surplus income) to order poles and netting. This is my first opportunity to use the netting.

Last year, I planted two beds with broccoli. The flea beetles got them all. This year I planted the broccoli in different beds in hopes that my favorite vegetable will escape a similar fate.

Time will tell.

The blessings of proper tools

With the winter being as mild as it's been, I've actually had the opportunity to get some pre-season garden work done.

A lot of this is simply clean-up work I should have done last fall, but didn't get around to; things like weeding the beds and raking up leaves.

One of the things I wanted to get done before spring planting was to apply a generous layer of compost on each bed. In October when I harvested potatoes, the task took longer than I would have liked simply because the soil was more clay-y than anticipated and digging was hard work. Additional compost (and some sand) will help alleviate that issue.

Thanks to the diligent efforts of the cows, we have no shortage of compost. The trouble is our property is almost entirely sloped, and the compost needed to be moved from down there...

...to up here.

The difference may not look like much until you're pushing a wheelbarrow filled with about 75 lbs. of compost a hundred yards uphill with an elevation change of about 20 feet. Trust me, as I figured out last fall when I put compost on the two garlic beds, it's exhausting work.

I needed to add at least two wheelbarrows' worth of compost to 30+ beds. Sixty trips pushing that heavy wheelbarrow uphill. No wonder I put it off.

Then Don stepped in and saved the day by offering to move some compost into the garden with the tractor. God bless my husband.

The garden is long and narrow. When we fenced it last year, we did so with the understanding that we would need to remove sections of fencing from time to time (such as now).

I started by clipping the hog rings holding the deer netting to the cattle panels.

Leaving the deer netting dangling from the overhead wire, I peeled back the cattle panel to open up a section of the fence.

Meanwhile, using the tractor, Don started scooping up bucket-loads of compost and bringing it around the perimeter of the property to the garden. (In a perfect world, the barn, compost pile, and garden would be cozily clustered together, making this an easy process. We do not live in a perfect world, so using the tractor to move compost means a bit of a drive for each load.)

Altogether he was able to move six bucket-loads of compost for me (for starters), which amounts to hundreds of pounds of this "black gold."

When he was finished, I moved the fencing back into place and started filling the wheelbarrow. Because I was moving on relatively flat ground for a much shorter distance, I could fill the wheelbarrow fuller, to perhaps 100 lbs. or so.

Then I trundled it over to various beds and dumped it. A thousand percent easier than shoving the wheelbarrow uphill.

It goes without saying that the tractor has saved us immeasurable work over the years, ever since we bought it back in 2015.

This force multiplier is one of the best tools we ever acquired, and as we get older, it gets even more valuable.

I tell ya, the blessings of having the proper tools on a homestead.