Vacations are hard on the garden!

Here's an obvious fact: you can't work in your garden while you're on vacation. I have often realized that after returning from a Summer vacation, so this year we took an early Spring vacation. Leaving on March 30th for a week or so, I thought would be a great time for a vacation. After all, not much is going on in the garden yet. Of course I only thought that until we returned. We had a great time on vacation visiting my brother and family (I have a new baby nephew!) and even getting away for a quiet night alone with my wife, but I have soooo much to do now.

Yesterday I worked all day in the yard and garden and I journaled about it the old fashioned way - on paper. Soon I will convert that to these electronic pages to document how things are going with my peas, garlic, potato onions, lettuce, early tomatoes etc.

While on vacation I didn't entirely leave the garden behind. I found a great little old fashioned general store in the mountains of Kentucky with cheap seeds and seed potatoes. I bought more peas, beans, onion sets and 40 pounds of seed potatoes - so now I have even more to do!

I bought some Red Pontiac and Irish Cobbler potatoes. Hopefully I will get them planted this week! The weather is great now and Spring is springing - how exciting!

So this is just a quick post to let you know that I haven't abandoned Garden Desk or my garden. Quite the opposite is true. Stay tuned for more....

A Potato Green Thumb Sunday Update

Have you ever heard of growing potatoes in tires? You fill a tire full of garden soil and plant a few potatoes. After the plants get to be about two feet tall, you add another tire on top of the first one and fill more compost or soil around the potato plants up to the top of that tire. When the potato growth gets taller again, you add another tire and more dirt. I've seen people get up to five tires high! The potato plant amazingly makes more tubers along what was originally the above ground part of the plant.

Well, I don't have any extra tires to do this with and I think that would be a bit ugly anyway. However, the idea is a sound one so I am attempting to repeat the concept using boards to make my raised beds higher and higher.

I have Kennebec and Yukon Gold potatoes tightly spaced in the raised beds so I can do this. last year I tired this with some success, but the beds were too large. It takes a lot of extra soil to raise 20 square feet even one foot higher.

This year I planted them in beds 4 foot by 3 foot, and 4 foot by 2 foot, so I could more easily add more wood and soil to the beds. Unfortunately, that is STILL too big of an area.

By accident however, I discovered the perfect size bed for this technique - about 2 foot square.

My daughter planted only two seed potatoes in the corner of her garden bed. I then built up that portion of the bed with wood stakes and boards. As the potato plants keep getting taller, we will add another layer of boards and fill that in with more soil. By the time we are done, the "box" will be almost three feet tall.

What makes this even better than the tire idea is that we can take off some of the lower boards to harvest "new potatoes" any time we wish because the first tubers that are produced are at the bottom and as long as we keep making the box taller, the plant will keep producing!

Ironically, since I won't be capable of making my larger potato beds very high, my daughters 2x2 potato bed will out-produce my 4x3 beds. Next year we will make several small bed/boxes like hers. My daughter has really been teaching me about gardening this year without even trying. When it comes to these potatoes, good thing she has a green thumb!

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Diggin' For Gold!

Digging potatoes for the first time feels like you are uncovering buried treasure, especially for kids. Even more so when you plant "Yukon Gold" potatoes. This is the first year we've planted potatoes and it was very successful. In our garden as a kid, digging potatoes was hard work because they were planted in our hard Kentucky clay soil. I read on some other blogs in May about growing potatoes in barrels or in a stack of tires to make harvesting easier. I didn't do either, but I used the spirit of the idea.

I started with only 10 seed potatoes, cut them in half and planted the 20 pieces in a 4 foot by 5 foot section of one of my beds. The compost pile was in that spot the previous year, so the soil was great. As the plants grew, I kept adding good dirt and added a 2nd and 3rd landscape timber layer making the bed even more raised. I had planned to keep getting higher and higher like you would growing them in tires, but I ran out of good soil. The plants make potato tubers all along what once was the stem of the plant if you keep burying the stem. When it came time to harvest, it was easy to get a shovel in and under the potatoes. A few times we harvested them small to add to a roast or something. When we did this we could just reach our hand down in the dirt and find a potato without disturbing the plant. Good loose soil is key! For the rest of the plants, we waited until the tops died back and the potatoes were pretty good size. We got several big bowls full of potatoes in just a small amount of space. Look at the potato in the picture below next to the quarter as reference:

I definitely recommend the barrel or tire method. If any of you have written about this or know someone who has, please let me know and I will link to it.

Next year I will grow a lot more potatoes so we can dig for more gold! The flavor of Yukon Gold is excellent too. They are a yellow color even after they are cooked. I bought mine from PineTree Garden Seeds, which is my favorite seed company. They also have "Red Gold" potatoes if you want to stay in the pirate theme!

What a Great Harvest!

Wow have we been blessed with a great harvest so far! The garden is exploding with tomatoes, potatoes, cucumbers, onions, zucchini and green beans.

We have been busy picking everything, making pickles and salsa, and freezing green beans. My daughters have been great about picking and snapping the beans.

We have been having a lot of fun with the harvest. We are still waiting on the corn and melons, but everything else has been doing well. The only thing not doing well are the carrots. We allowed the cantaloupe to take over the carrot and radish beds because I never put up the trellis that I was planning to build.

I hope your gardens are doing well. Sorry that I haven't posted in over a month. I have much to tell you and lots of pictures. I will try to get back to posting often. I want to tell you about what happened with the baby robins, and how the tomato supports have done. I have some interesting bugs to show you, some funny canning stories and much more. Check back frequently! Until then, blessings to you all.