I couldn’t resist!
But first, the cuteness! Just because.
It looks like we’ve got at least two blue eyes babies among the three mostly white kittens. I think we’ll call this one Zipper. In the next image, there’s a white and grey/black in a cuddle puddle inside the cat house. That one is Grommet, and I don’t think he’s got blue eyes. Eyelet is in the last image in the series, and he’s got blue eyes. It’s too early to tell with the grublings, of course. Their eyes are just starting to open, still.
After checking on the kittens, I did my evening rounds. The chitted potatoes in the portable greenhouse are clearly dead; if they weren’t already dead, the heat in there cooked them. So I brought out the new bags and laid them out in trays to get some light. Both bags of potatoes were growing, one quite a bit more than the other.
At first, I was just going to leave the trays of potatoes in the old kitchen, where they wouldn’t be affected so much by temperature extremes. It was such a lovely evening, though, I decided to prepare a bed for them.
Then I just didn’t stop until it was done! š
I decided to use the bed that had been winter sown with summer squash seeds. There’s been no sign of any squash germinating. This bed already had protective netting over it, so I decided to just go for it.
The first thing to do was lift the netting off to one side and remove the support posts, for access. Then I went over it with a garden fork to loosen things before weeding it. Inside the bed was mostly crab grass and maple seedlings. Along the edges was dandelions and crab grass.
This bed has seen a few years of amending, even taking into account the whole thing got shifted over last year. Which means these potatoes are going into the softest, fluffiest soil since we’ve been gardening here. Which should also mean, bigger potatoes.
We shall see.
While weeding, I did find some squash seeds. Not a lot. There was no evidence of germination on any of them. Some felt “empty”. As if only the outer shell remained. It’s entirely possible that we’ll still have some summer squash show up later on, but I think it highly unlikely. If any do sprout, I’ll probably transplant them. Meanwhile, along with some flower seeds, I did pick up a packet of zucchini to go with my white patty pans as back up summer squash seeds.
Once the weeding was done, I used a thatching rake to create a wide, flat trench down the middle, so accommodate a double row of potatoes. I then emptied the rest of a bag of sheep manure into the trench and worked that in with a garden fork.
From there, my daughter helped me bring the trays of potatoes out. She gave the trench a thorough watering while I went through the potatoes and cut a few of the larger ones into two.
We then planted the potatoes in a double row, but found ourselves with 5 or 6 “extra” potatoes. Not enough to start another bed with. So we set them in the largest looking open spaces down the middle. Which makes things rather other crowded for potatoes but, to be honest, I don’t expect them all to make it.
Once the potatoes were set out in the trench, we mounded the soil over them and evened it out.
Then came the “fun” job of putting the supports and netting back. They’d been set pretty deep, as I was originally trying to put the mosquito netting over them, so there had been a lot of slack with the black netting I ended up using, instead. We put them back without pushing them so far down, which took up some of the slack in the netting. The twine ended up sagging more in some places and too tight in others, so it took a while to get it close to where it was supposed to be, before tacking down the edges of the netting.
That didn’t stop Magda from finding a way inside and then having trouble finding her way out again!!!
Once the netting was set and secured, the whole thing got another thorough watering.
We’re supposed to get about an hour of rain tonight. I won’t be holding my breath on that, since I kept getting notifications this morning about how long the thunderstorm was going to last, when we didn’t even have a drop of rain. It’s supposed to start raining again tomorrow evening, then keep raining all through Friday. Tomorrow’s high is supposed to be a bit on the high side, though nothing like the past couple of days, then the temperatures as supposed to drop significantly on Friday. At least we’re not expected to get temperatures below freezing on Friday and Saturday nights, but it’s still supposed to get quite close to freezing.
For now, I want the potato bed to get as much rain as possible, but when the overnight temperatures are expected to drop closer to freezing, I have plastic that’s large enough to cover the netting on the entire bed, with enough excess to weigh it down along all sides. We should have only two nights where it’s supposed to be cold enough at night, that it might kill things off.
In the photos, you can see how well the garlic is doing. We are quite looking forward to having scapes to harvest!
So, there we are! One more thing planted in our garden.
Hopefully, they’ll even survive. š
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 
Aww! At age 7, I named my first cat Zipper.
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