New *Improved* Potato Bins

Today Mickey helped me rebuild the potato bins, and they look sweet, if I do say so myself.  So far, we just have one around the earlies, and I will be in desperate need of compost to fill it, as well as building a second bin. Of course I still have about 30 seed potatoes to plant but the ground is much to wet to work at all.

The Giant Jersey Knight asparagus is tipping out of the ground about two a day for the last two days.  I am very excited for the arrival of Asparagus harvesting!  It is a proud moment for me, and I encourage the investment of time and money to anyone who enjoys this crop, it is so worth the effort and the wait!  Being Perennial, a lot of people are afraid to try to grow it, but it is so easy, anyone can and should try it.  Not to mention when the harvest is done, the ferns are so graceful and pretty in the garden.

I have been seeding spinach and lettuce, and I plan to continue that, as well as carrots outdoors until I finally get a sprout or two.  I will also be planting another sowing of peas soon as well, So we can continue to harvest as long as possible.  The succession of planting is a bit harder to time than I had expected, but we are going to keep trying to get everything in and pray that there is room for it all! =)

My new Tomato, Pepper and Eggplants seem to be doing quite nicely in the Prop Box, until the proper planting time. And we are about to start sowing more seed.  Roma Tomato, melons, and squash for early summer and another round following by a few weeks.  That is the tentative plan, anyhow. I want to try to have some really late tomatoes that will have to be pulled before frost.  The more that I get growing the more I have to learn about it. I think will have plenty of fresh veggies this year, but that doesn't stop me from wondering how to grow more!

Yesterday we also bought a garden cart from a neighborhood kid.  It is pretty sweet, and we have considered getting one before but they run about $100 and Mickey knew he could weld one up, he just never has.  This one was at a good price and I think it will come in very handy.  I have already used it to drag bagged leaves all over the yard and move pots from here to there.  And I bet the kids will love to be drug around the yard in it, too!

March: picture update 2 of 2

This is the other side of the potato bin (you could see from views of the Asparagus Bed, in Update 1 of 2). This is seriously ghetto, I know, but it should hold the taters in and allow me to pile some serious amounts of soil on the plants as they grow, which should produce a lot more taters. When I read about it last year, there were experiments being done on the best varieties for this method of planting...and I thought it was the small ones, and not the russets...but I can't remember! I couldn't find the link, but if I do, I will post it. There is another row of potato bins in the works soon....but this is the earlies and my first attempt at building them.

This is just one of the longer sprouts poking out of the soil. They are planted in a tilled bed, rather shallowly, because I will be dumping soil on them as they grow, and they will hopefully produce spuds at this level and above. This is actually the most important part of the potato plant, because this sprout is forming the main stem, that the potatoes grow from (directly above the cut pieces that are planted.) From this level and above, is where the spuds form, so it is important to continue to pile the dirt on and keep the "eyes" reaching for light. I believe, the theory that makes the potato bins work, is by keeping this covered, and reaching for light, you lengthen greatly, the amount of plant that is under the soil, and keep it striving to produce green leaves for food....but as long as it can survive on the nutrients of the planted tuber, it should have the energy to get much larger for me, and produce greater yields...in theory.....that is the way I understand it. For this reason, I will be throwing my bagged humus on them, until I can get a truck load of compost. I am going to try to keep them from getting real leaves by burying them and withholding fertilizer until the last possible moment (when it starts to produce real leaves). And even then, a lower dose of Nitrogen, might be a good idea until later in the season, when it really needs the full canopy and switches it's focus to maturing the tubers it already has produced. It will be very interesting to see how the theory works and what helps it work.... =)

here are some spud links:

potato from ground up