Yukon potatoes

Our 2025 Garden: last of the potatoes, prepping beds and a bumper crop

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I’m happy to say I was able to get some progress in the garden yesterday evening, and again today.

I did not continue cleaning the sun room today. My daughter will finish that, but she will restart tomorrow. It turned out that, after trying to keep up with me yesterday, she hurt her back! I keep forgetting, I’m the most able bodied person in the household right now. The kittens, meanwhile, have been piling into the cat cage. It got a bit chilly last night – cold enough that I covered the winter squash, but not cold enough to cover the summer squash, peppers or eggplant – and they was a whole crowd of littles in the cat cage’s cat bed. Most of the other cat beds they could access are outside right now. Only one of the smaller kittens has figured out there are cat beds on the platform, and is able to climb up the shelf to get to them. With the floor now dry, I did put one of the cat beds and the self heating mat on the floor for them to use.

This is what I was able to get done yesterday, before it got too dark.

This is the bed that had three types of tomatoes, bush beans and self seeded carrots in it. I pulled the remaining stems and roots of the tomatoes an the bush beans and set them aside. They will get buried in the bed later on. In the second picture, you can see the finished bed. Most of what I pulled out of there can’t go into the compost, as their roots will spread. In the last picture, you can see the bonus Uzbek Golden carrots that were large enough to keep. The greens will also be buried in the bed. I’ll be doing some amending later one. I’ll be using this bed for winter sowing, but have not yet decided what I will put in it.

This afternoon was pretty hot, so I chose to harvest the last of the potatoes, then work on that bed. At this time of the year, and at that time of the day, most of the bed was shaded by trees, so it was a lot more comfortable to work on.

This is how many potatoes I found in the remaining two or three feet of the bed.

I was really surprised by how many tree roots I was finding while I dug them up. That’s quite the distance! I thought that maybe they were from the other direction, but the nearest tree on the south side is the chokecherry tree. They spread through their roots, but the suckers all come up close to the main trunk. As I worked on the bed, though, it was clear what direction the roots were coming from.

I ended up making a short video when I was done.

I cleaned up only one long side of the bed before I had to stop for hydration and sustenance. I’ll probably work on the rest tomorrow. At the end, you can see all the rocks I “harvested”. !!! Keep in mind that this bed had been amended several times, the soil sifted several times, most recently when all the beds were sifted over into their permanent positions. Not only that but this bed was winter sown with summer squash, which did not take, so it was trenched and cleaned up before we planted the potatoes.

All those rocks were what we “grew” since the potatoes were planted in the spring. Just the bigger ones that were easier to pick up, and I know there were plenty that got missed because they kept getting buried in the soil while I loosened it and pulled as many weeds and roots as I could.

Before I headed in for a break, I just had to check out the blooming asters.

Sir Robin was already checking them out.

Still no Cosmos, but there do seem to be a few more flower buds trying to develop.

Tonight is supposed to be a bit warmer, so I don’t plan to cover the winter squash again, unless that changes. The next couple of nights are looking chilly enough that I might cover the other beds, too. Unless I decide to harvest the Turkish Orange eggplants, first. The peppers can stay for a while longer, as long as the weather holds.

I have decided the bed I’m working on now will be where I plant the garlic in a few weeks. This time, I’m thinking of making sure to mark exactly where they are planted, and then interplanting with something else before the ground freezes. Maybe spinach and/or some other greens. In theory, the garlic should protect any greens growing with them from the deer, same as onions can. The greens would be finished before the garlic is ready to harvest, and could be succession sowed with something else that’s quick growing. Bush beans, perhaps. We shall see.

It’s not a lot of progress. As usual, it was a bigger job than expected. Particularly as I got closer to the north end of the bed, where both the tree roots and rocks were so much denser. Still, a little progress is better than none at all!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: cold damage, and a morning harvest

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Last night, a daughter and I covered three areas in the garden.

I rigged a cage of sorts around the summer squash large enough to fit around the large leaves. Our covers are old sheets, and one was large enough to cover the summer squash, though nowhere near large enough to reach the ground. Which was okay, as we weren’t expecting actual frost.

The peppers and eggplant in the wattle weave garden all have their own wire tomato cages, so we just needed to use some clothespins to keep the covers from blowing away. The way the peppers are laid out in the shorter end of the L shaped bed allowed them to be covered more than the eggplant, which are in a longer row. The cloth was just barely long enough to reach from end to end. As a result, the first and last eggplants had less coverage, with one of them being at a more exposed end of the bed.

You can see there is some cold damage to the leaves.

Depending on what app I checked, we dropped to either 6C/43F or 5C/41F last night. It’s hard to say so soon, but it looks like the winter squash, which we have no way to cover, managed okay. In fact, just this evening, I spotted two female flowers in the Mashed Potato squash that I hand pollinated. I’m not sure why I’m bothering, but at least they’ll have a chance!

Our overnight temperatures are supposed to warm up for the next while, so we shouldn’t need to cover them again for some time. In fact, some of our daytime highs are supposed to get downright hot. By the second week of September, however, the long range forecast has changed again, and we’re not looking at dipping below freezing, right around our old average frost date. The new 30 year averages have been released, which suggested our growing season has actually increased by quite a bit, but I’m not counting on that. Based on the previous average frost dates, we’ve got a 99 day growing season, and I think that’s still the more accurate one. That’s the thing with averages. All it takes is one or two unusual years to shift things quite a bit, even if they’re now showing a range of dates, rather than a single date.

This morning, I harvested some potatoes and a few other things for a supper I was planning on.

The potatoes are what I found under a couple of plants. For all that the plants struggled this year and there isn’t a lot, we do have some really nice potatoes! I grabbed a couple more kohl rabi (not too many of those left now!), some Swiss Chard, thyme, oregano, sage and lemon balm, as well as some walking onion bulbils.

All of this, plus some carrots I still had in the fridge, a Sub Arctic Plenty tomato the family hadn’t eaten yet, an entire bulb of fresh garlic (about 6 large cloves), some stewing beef and chunks of sausage, got used to make an Instant Pot one pot meal.

I do like being able to set up either the Instant Pot or the Crockpot and just leave it. Today, it meant I could get a nap in! We’re a real messed up household right now. My husband’s dealing with a broken tooth on top of his constant back pain. My younger daughter had a rough night and has been caning it today – yet she still just came back from picking the Spoon tomatoes for me! My older daughter has been walloped by her PCOS again. I’m still dealing with a wonky hip, plus my injured left arm is still causing issues, but it’s starting to look like I’m the most able bodied person in the household again!

I had thought I could use the riding mower and mow the lawn today. After all the rain we’ve had, it actually needs it again. When I went to bed last night, the forecast was for sun and a few clouds for the next week. This morning, that changed to a light rain, pretty much all day! They’re still saying we’ll be getting sun with some clouds for at least a week, but who knows what we’ll actually get. I’m certainly not going to complain about more rain, though. We still need it so badly!

It does make things hard to plan around, though. There are things I’d like to get some work done on before I start making my monthly stock up shopping trips to the city, plus my follow up medical appointment about my arm, and so on. Things that need to be done when it’s dry, or at least not raining. I have this constant sense of running out of time.

Ah, well. It is what it is, and there’s only so much we can do. Having all four of us struggling with physical limitations at the time time, though, was not something I had ever expected when we moved out here, though!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: a nice harvest, and breakfast!

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This morning I collected our largest harvest yet, for this year!

I had some help, too.

When I prepared to transplant the melons, I set up a trellis for them using Dollarama steel fence posts and welded wire mesh salvaged from the old squash tunnel from years ago. When the Spoon tomatoes were planted in the other half of the bed, I use bamboo stakes to make them their own trellis.

Well, with the melons barely growing at all, they’re not going to need the trellis. So, with my daughter’s help, we pulled the posts, with the wire still on them, and moved them over to the corn and Arikara squash bed. It’s loosely set up for now, but the 4′ square bed will get a wire fence around it – the mesh is just long enough! – to hopefully keep the raccoons from getting into the corn, when the cobs are ready. I’ll probably have to put some sort of cover over it, too, or they’ll just climb up and over.

The corn bed has plastic netting around it. Hopefully, they will be dissuaded from the corn rather than tearing their way through.

After moving the melon trellis away, the Spoon tomatoes can now be reached from both sides, so my daughter helped me pick tomatoes on one side, while I did the other.

There were lots of Spoon tomatoes to pick!

I’m glad I remembered to bring a separate container for the Spoon tomatoes!

There was also a whole two Royal Burgundy beans to pick, from the three surviving plants. I did pick a small handful of yellow bush beans last night, though, so there was enough to actually use. While checking last night, I noticed some ripening Sub Arctic Plenty tomatoes and this morning, one was ready to grab.

After that, I dug up some potatoes, then winter sown carrots from the high raised bed.

In the next image in the slide show above, you can see a very wonky potato!

That was from roots.

These potatoes were picked from about the middle of the bed, so at least twenty feet away from the trees. My garden fork was digging up more roots than potatoes.

Those trees have got to go.

Then I remembered we have herbs and stuff, so I went to the old kitchen garden, where I gathers some lemon thyme, lemon balm and oregano. In the winter sown bed, I grabbed a few Swiss Chard leaves. I even grabbed some bulbils from the walking onions, since we don’t want them to spread any further.

Once inside, the longest time was spent getting all those little green bits of stem off all those Spoon tomatoes! I also set aside some of the ripest looking ones to collect seeds from, later. Their seeds are so tiny, I’ll have to consider how best to do that!

In the last photo – which looked much better and in focus on my phone, I swear! – it what I made with it. There’s still potatoes and Spoon tomatoes left, plus the one Sub Arctic Plenty tomato, but I used up all the carrots, julienned, a handful of bush beans cut small, the onion bulbils and a whole head of garlic. We still have fresh garlic left of the ones that were too far along for curing and winter storage. Then there was the chard and herbs.

When I went into town to get kibble yesterday, I also picked up some chicken legs and thighs that were on sale, which my older daughter prepared last night, so breakfast (brunch?) was the vegetables gathered this morning, plus oven roasted chicken legs.

It was very good!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: first zucchini forming, a harvest for the day, and those trees have got to go!

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First up, I spotted our first blooming female zucchini flower today!

There’s another one under it that bloomed and was done before I ever saw that it was a female flower.

There were no male flowers open at the time, so I grabbed a couple of older ones and tore off the petals so I could access the pollen and hand pollinate. The first one had water pour out when the petals were torn off, so I used a second one, too, just in case the first one didn’t have any viable pollen. At this point, it’s too early to tell if the one I missed had a chance to be pollinated before it was done blooming.

This afternoon, I decided to use up a whole bunch of odds and ends vegetables in the fridge, along with some fresh stuff, in the slow cooker. I’ve been leaving the potato bed for the past while but decided to dig some up for today’s use.

I had dug some up before under the potato plants that had died back the most, which was at the north end of the bed, closer to that row of self seeded trees my mother left to grow. The entire potato bed died back early, without ever developing flowers, but the north end of the bed had them dying back the fastest.

Well, I’ve pretty much confirmed why.

The potatoes in that basket are from under four potato plants that were at the end of that bed. That mass beside the basket is capillary roots from the elm trees nearby that came up while I was digging around for the potatoes. I was hitting more, larger roots as well. I’ve de-rooted these beds several times, and they come back so fast!!

Those trees have GOT to go! They’re killing our garden!

I dug up more potatoes closer to the middle of the bed, and was still getting a lot of capillary roots like that, but found more potatoes under two plants, than under the four I’d dug up first.

Since I finally had a container on hand, I harvested Spoon tomatoes. It’s been a while since I picked any, so there were plenty to gather. Thankfully, the mesh on this basket is fine enough to hold the tomatoes! Some of them were so small, they would have fallen through if they weren’t being held in place by the larger ones. I had to be careful to keep the potatoes from rolling over and squishing them.

Then I grabbed a few more carrots to add to what we already had inside, and the only ripe bush beans I could find.

In the last photo of the slide show above, it shows all the vegetables I prepared for the slow cooker, seasoned and tossed with avocado oil. All from our garden!

There are the potatoes, carrots and Spoon tomatoes, of course. Plus I finally used that one big turnip that I’d left to get big and go to seed, but the deer ate most of the greens. There’s kohlrabi in there, and more beans that we had in the fridge. It took three “harvests” of bush beans to have enough to make it worth using them in anything! Oh, and there is Swiss Chard and a whole bulb of fresh garlic in there, too.

We have a large Crockpot, and the vegetables almost filled it completely. They will shrink as they cook down, though. After I left for my mother’s, my daughter browned some ground turkey, along with some of the yellow onions we still have left from last year’s garden (they have lasted a really long time!!!) and mixed that in later on.

The slow cooker was set to high for 3 hours. Since I’ve come back from my mother’s, I’ve checked on it a few times and added more time. All those potatoes need extra time to cook through, as I deliberately left them in big chunks. For I still don’t know how it turned out!

The house is smelling amazing, though, and I’m getting hungry! 😄

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: rescuing neglected strawberries, mulching potatoes and more

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Last year, we planted a little plot of Albion everbearing strawberries. They did fantastic!

Until they got eaten by deer.

Repeatedly.

They even tore through the net barrier I’d put around them, and I ended up having to use some leftover pieces of chicken wire. By then, there wasn’t much of the season left, but the bed did get heavily mulched for the winter, with some chicken wire draped over the whole bed for protection.

I did remove some of the mulch in the spring, but in the end, the bed got severely neglected this year.

Amazingly, some strawberries survived.

The strawberries I’d planted in front of the new asparagus bed, however, did not. Not a single one made it. I had simply taken too long before planting them, I think.

We do, however, now have a third Jersey Giant asparagus fern growing! So I still have some home for the rest of those, and the purple asparagus.

The first thing to do was to find and dig up the Albion strawberries and see how many there were.

I’m afraid I had to be pretty rough with them. The crab grass rhizomes were bad enough, but I was also finding new elm roots invading from below. When I planted this bed, I’d dug up as many roots as I could, then covered the bottom with several layers of carboard before adding fresh soil on top, in which the strawberries were planted.

You’d never know I’d done all that, from the roots I was finding!

Those elm trees have got to go.

I actually found quite a few more strawberry plants than I expected! In the end, I found 10 plants, plus a runner with fresh roots in it, though no leaves yet.

All of these went into a bucket with some water while I worked on where to plant them.

At first, when I thought there were just a few, I had expected to plant them at one end of the bed with the Spoon tomatoes, but there were enough that I decided to reclaim the space I’d planted bare root strawberries in that failed. The shallow trench they were planted in were, of course, filled with elm tree seedlings, along with plenty of other weeds.

There was still some soil left in the old kiddie pool we used as a planter last year, so once the weeds were cleared out, I used that to fill in the shallow trench the strawberries had been planted in. This was more for the asparagus, since I didn’t feel I’d been able to cover the crowns properly on that side.

While clearing the weeds out, I did not find a single sign of the bare root strawberries that had been planted there.

Totally my own fault. They should have gone in the ground as soon as I got them. Instead, they sat for about a month.

Then I decided to take some short logs from the old kitchen garden retaining wall and set them along the little wire fence, to prevent erosion and water run off.

That done, I thoroughly watered the newly added soil. It was bone dry in that little pool. Once everything was well hydrated, I spaced out the strawberry plants in between where the asparagus crowns were planted.

Once those were in and watered again, I went and got more grass clippings to mulch both the strawberries and the asparagus.

Then, because I had enough for it, I got more loads of grass clippings and mulched the potatoes.

By this time, it was getting pretty late, and I was being eaten alive by mosquitoes.

I did continue watering the rest of the garden beds for the night, though. As long as I was moving the mosquitoes weren’t as bad.

While I was watering the grapes, I spotted some friends.

We haven’t seen these in a couple of years! They are Abbott’s sphinx Sphecodina abbottii  and look VERY different, at different stages of development.

Around the edge of the spruce grove, I paused to check on the wild saskatoons growing there.

We actually have ripe berries developing!

I got a picture, then I ate them!

They’re not as big and juicy as they could be; we haven’t had a lot of rain, and the undergrowth is starting to crowd them again. We need to get under them with the loppers and clear it all out again.

All in all, things are going pretty good in the garden. At least, for our region. I have to keep reminding myself of that when I watch gardening videos, and I see all these people posting about their huge plants and amazing harvests. They all tend to be at least a month ahead of us!

I’m happy I got as much done this evening as I did. I’m not sure how much I’ll get to go tomorrow. Not only will it be hotter, but I’ll be driving my husband to his appointment. Thankfully, the AC in the truck works fine, because that heat is going to be brutal on him.

After tomorrow, the highs are supposed to drop a bit for the next while, then get right back up to the “heat warnings in effect” level again.

On the plus side, the peppers and eggplant will be just loving these temperatures!

😄😄

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: morning in the garden

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I am not a morning person.

Seriously.

I can appreciate mornings. The cooler temperatures and softer lighting are great. Especially for working in the garden. Unfortunately, my body just can’t handle it. I’ve never been a morning person. The absolute best scheduling I ever had was when I worked the night shift at a gas station. I was alert and motivated all night, slept well all day; physically and mentally, I was at my best!

Unfortunately, I’m not able to do that now, and this time of year, I find myself being awakened earlier and earlier, no matter what time I make it to bed. This morning, I was up at 4 – 4:30 and just could not get back to sleep.

Still, I managed to get some thing done in the garden after doing my morning rounds.

I finally got this bed weeded. I had to wait until things got bigger. I still had to be really careful, and pulled only what I was 100% sure was a weed. In the first photo above, you can easily spot the nasturtiums and Cosmos. In the second photo, there are little sprouts of what I hope are the asters. I’ve never grown asters from seed, and I’m not sure what they are supposed to look like at this stage. I’ve even looking at photos online and am still not 100% sure. There are just too many things that look like this at this stage!

I couldn’t get everything, of course. I’ll be weeding those awful elm seeds all summer, I’m sure.

I had a surprise when I got to the winter squash bed. I’m not sure what these are.

Those are insects of some kind. They were only on the blossoms, and only on the squash. They’re so tiny, I can’t make out any identifying features. I tried asking in a gardening group and did get a response of one possible thing, but on looking them up, they seemed much bigger. Pretty much anything would be bigger! The solution was to spray with soapy water, so later in the day, I tried that. The blossoms were closed by then, though, so I don’t know how much good it did.

Our potatoes are looking good.

It won’t be long before the protective netting can be removed.

I also got another little harvest of garlic scapes.

They’re smaller this year. When picking them, I tuck the coils over a finger to carry them. Last year, I was putting them around my wrist.

After I was done my rounds, I headed inside for breakfast and planned to go back out to start working on the trellis bed. In the end, I didn’t make it. I was falling asleep in my chair. I finally gave up and went for a nap. Something I’ve found myself having to do fairly regularly.

I get better sleep in those 1-2 hour morning naps than in an entire night! It is a bit disorienting to wake up and it’s still morning, though. 😄

My goal for today was to get started on the remaining vertical supports for the permanent trellis bed.

As good as I felt, this put me outside at the hottest part of the day.

My goals got shifted, and progress was made. Just on something else!

Which will be in my next post.

See you there!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: potatoes mulched and carrots planted

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One of the things I was able to get done while it was still cooler this morning, as I was finishing up with watering the garden beds, we to finally mulch the potato bed.

This bed had the summer squash winter sown in it and I made a point of saving the leaf mulch along one side, to be added as the seedlings came up. Except they never came up. Now that the potatoes are planted here and have had a chance to, hopefully, start rooting themselves, and I think I even saw some potato leaves starting to poke through, I decided it was time to return the mulch. I will not be hilling the potatoes, just mulching them.

The bed got a deep watering, first. Then I lifted the netting along the one side and basically just tossed handfuls of leaves over the soil, trying not to include any dandelion flowers with it! Quite a lot of dandelions were growing right through the mulch on the one side, so I pulled a lot of that, too. Once the mulch was in place, it got another thorough watering.

The next thing I worked on was planting carrots on either side of the sugar snap peas.

That job required some damage repair, first. When I watered the bed this morning, I found something had been digging into the edge, all along one side, undermining things.

So the very first thing to do was put the soil back into the bed. I was going to just use a hoe, at first, but realized there was a lot of creeping Charlie trying to creep its way into the bed again, so after removing the protective boards, I went through it all by hand, removing as many of the roots as I could, before replacing the dug away soil.

There isn’t a lot of space between the peas and the edge of the bed, though. Just enough for one row of carrots. I created a slight trench to plant them in, as we are expecting drought conditions this year, and a trench will have any rainfall flow towards the carrots, rather than washing away down the sides of the bed. I used the jet setting on the hose to basically drill water into the trench. This both ensures the water gets quite deep, but the water helps level out the trench itself for planting.

This side got the Atomic Red carrots I got from MI Gardener this year as back up seeds. While we do have carrots coming up among the winter sown beds, there don’t seem to be a lot of them, and I do want to have quite a lot of carrots to store for the winter.

After the seeds were sown, I used the mister on the the spray nozzle to “bury” the seeds a little. Then I put boards back over the trench. Two of the boards that were there before were pretty broken up on the ends, so I traded them for more solid ones that were weighing down the plastic on the bed that’s still solarizing. Three boards wasn’t quite long enough, but I already had a short scrap piece for the last bit at the end.

The boards had been placed along the outside of the peas, and mulch down the middle of the bed, to keep the cats from using the bed as a litter box. They would still walk across the bed, though, and would end up moving the boards. Every now and then, I’d find a board rotates with one end over the peas and the other hanging off the edge of the beds. To prevent that, I got out some of the short bamboo plant stakes I picked up at the dollar store that came in packs of 25. I stuck a bunch of them into the soil along the boards, to prevent the boards from moving if a cat walked over it.

That still left the problem of whatever was digging all along the side of the bed. For that, I went into the stacks of short logs that had been used to frame these beds, before they were shifted over into their permanent positions. I dug out the straightest ones I could find and jammed them into the soil along the sides of the bed. Hopefully, they will be enough to deter the digging.

I repeated the process on the other side. On this side, I used our home made seed tape with Uzbek Golden Carrots. These are older seeds, though, so I doubled them up. Thankfully, the wet soil was enough to keep the wind from blowing them away! A final misting, and they got covered with boards, too. Only one of these had to be traded out. I found more short logs to set on that side of the bed, too.

Over the next while, we’ll keep checking under the boards to make sure things are damp, and to remove them as soon as we see seedlings starting to come up.

Eventually, more protection will be added to this bed, to make sure the deer don’t eat the peas. I still haven’t decided just how to do that, though.

One job down! How many more could I get done today?

I’d figure that out, after lunch and hydration!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: potatoes in

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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! 😄

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. 😄

The Re-Farmer