I'm finally getting started on my garden at home now that the weather is starting to be warm enough at night to put plants in the garden. In this growing zone, we usually start the planting around the memorial day weekend. Cold tolerant plants such as carrots and peas can be planted a bit earlier, but tomato plants have to wait until the danger of frost is past. I could plant the potatoes earlier, but they won't start growing until the ground warms up to a certain temperature, so there's not much point in planting them early.
I wasn't going to plant any potatoes in the home garden this year because I grew them there last year, but I changed my mind. I decided to plant 1 row of potatoes next to the walk path for the raised bed. The rest of that section of the garden will probably be planted with popcorn this year. I started small, but the row kept getting longer.
Supervisor cat was inspecting the work...
I had these small potatoes left over from last year's crop. They have nice eye sprouts on them now so I decided to use them as seed potatoes. These are Goldrush Russet potatoes.
Put one potato with developing eye sprouts in each hole. Have the most developed eye sprouts facing up in the hole. You don't have to plant them very deep, especially if you're going to hill the plants as they grow taller. Also, the deeper you plant them, the deeper you have to dig to harvest them in the fall.
Cover up the potatoes with dirt and you're done planting them.
If you have larger potatoes with several developing eyes on them, you can cut the potato into pieces to have more to plant. Just make sure each piece has at least one good eye on it. Don't make the pieces too small because the sprout feeds off the chunk of potato as it grows until it develops a root system.
Another thing I managed to get done was to plant a few more tomato plants in the raised bed. I have 7 plants in the raised bed now, with room for probably 3 more plants. This includes the San Marzano plants that I took out of the pots in the greenhouse 2 days ago to make room for the Amish Paste plants in the greenhouse.
I'm probably crazy for having this many plants growing, but when it gets to be time to can the tomatoes, you need a lot of them to process to have enough to cook down for sauce, or to cut up and put into jars. It's more efficient to have a canner ful when you process them instead of a half a canner full.
One other thing for this post, the 2 plum trees are in full bloom right now, and the aroma is awesome! You can smell it all over the yard if the wind isn't blowing much.
That's all I have for this post, I hope you found it interesting!
