Planted one 30′ row of red potatoes outside on the South side of the garden today. Yippee! They were free, so it’s no great loss if they get frozen, but I doubt they will.
I used the small red potatoes DW brought home from the kitchen at her work. They’ve been in a 5-gal bucket in the basement for at least a couple of months, and they have 6-12″ sprouts on them.
I laid them down on top of sod, one every 4-6″. Again, they were free, so I put them closer together than I might have if I had paid for them. I put corrugated cardboard or newspaper as close to them as I could on each side. I then put some several-year old, quite rotten wood chips on top of the cardboard or newspaper to hold it down, two wheelbarrows full (could have used three if I had a surplus, but they’re mostly gone). The chips were free from the guys clearing roadside trees and shrubs. Then I shoveled some dirt from the garden on top of the potatoes themselves.
So we’ll see how that works. I hope to kill the grass and get a good crop of potatoes this way, and expand the garden without having to turn over the sod by hand. It was still quite a bit of work to do that, but I really like experimenting with new ways of doing things.
In other gardening news, repotted more tomatoes and echinacea today. Moved one of the fluorescent fixtures from the seed-starting table in the living room to the greenhouse, so there are two in each location now. Had all the greenhouse plants outside in the sun until 1 or 2 pm. Also spread some leftover bone meal on the garden and dug some more quack grass.
Ending and Beginning 