One of those days

Have you ever had one of those days when you're incredibly productive? Yeah, today was that kind of day.

My work week starts on Thursday (I work an online job Thursday through Saturday). They're usually eleven or twelve-hour days, so I'm pretty tuckered by the end of  them. I've learned, therefore, to do chores on Wednesday, simply because it's nice to start the work week with a clean house.

Additionally, we've had a stretch of absolutely beautiful weather, with sunny days and temps in the low 70s. The birds are singing, the trees are budding, the grass is greening. Spring is here!

Sort of. Weather moves back in tonight and we have about a week of rain (and even a small chance of snow), so we enjoyed the sunshine while we could.

I started by washing our flannel sheets, and hanging them outside to dry. Drying flannel sheets indoors on drying racks is kinda awkward, but it's what I do all winter. Being able to hang them outdoors is a luxury indeed.

I also hung a regular load of laundry, parking the drying racks in the sun to take advantage of the warmth.

I steeped some sun tea.

Next I started a burn barrel. While that was happening, I started raking up all the fallen willow branches from the windy storms earlier this month, starting with the front and side yards. Willows are very pretty trees, but man they shed a lot.

I dumped everything next to the burn pit in the back yard so I could burn it. Darcy, intrigued by all the sticks I was conveniently providing, was a big help.

While the fire burned and Darcy chewed on sticks...

...I raked up the willow branches from the back yard and fed them into the fire. (The photo makes it seem like the fire had spread everywhere; I assure you it didn't.)

After this, I rooted around in the potato bin and pulled out 96 smallish potatoes for planting.

I wanted to plant six beds of potatoes, and figured 16 seed potatoes per bed.

I had prepped the beds yesterday, so they were easy to plant. Space, lever the dirt aside with a shovel, drop the potato in, voila.

It's a bit early to plant potatoes, but I'm willing to take my chances. Any excuse to get a jumpstart on the garden. I'll mulch them in a couple of weeks with straw.

Next I hauled in another load of firewood to add to the stash on the porch, to see us through the upcoming rainy weather.

We were low on kindling for the woodstove, so I collected some thin leftover slats from the shop...

...cut them on the bandsaw...

...and brought them up to the porch. Likely this will be enough kindling to see us through the remainder of the spring.

I emptied the ash bucket in the woodstove.

Then I did a small organizational chore that had been bugging me. In the pantry I keep a box where I store miscellaneous canning rings and assorted lids. It was over-full and hard to find canning rings when I needed them. Just one of those irksome things.

So I cleaned out the box and separated regular and wide-mouth rings into piles.

Then I threaded the rings onto string fastened with a shower clip for easy access.

I hung these in the pantry. I should have done this years ago.

Now my lid box has lots of room.

Next chore: Vacuuming the house (and cleaning the bird cage).

In the evening, I filled a tub with firewood...

...and watched the sky darken with incoming weather.

The very last thing I did today was put up this blog post. Whew, I'm bushed, but at least I have the satisfaction of knowing I got stuff done today.

Potato update

As you may recall, I planted potatoes in grow bags (again) this year. I tried this technique last year, but between a bad location and bad clay soil, it was a complete flop. This year I relocated the grow bags to a better location and used better soil.

The idea with indeterminate potatoes is to bury them in layers, because more potatoes will form from the stem. When I first planted them in grow bags in April, I put in about four inches of soil in bottom of the bags, laid down the seed potatoes, and buried them in about four more inches of soil. This meant the grow bags were about half-full. I also gave a modest sprinkle of fertilizer at this stage.

After that, it was a matter of waiting until the potatoes had grown enough that I could finish filling the bags with soil while still allowing enough leaves poking out to let the plans photosynthesize.

I did this over a period of a few days in late May/early June. It took a bit of practice before I got the hang of how best to get the dirt in among the potato plants without burying them irrevocably (the secret, I found, is to take a shovel-full of dirt and shake it over the plants, rather than dumping it).

This allowed me the chance to try to un-bury leaves as well. New tubers form from the stems, not the leaves, so I didn't want to bury the leaves unnecessarily. I accidentally broke a few leaves off during this process, but I figured it was early enough in the season to give the potatoes time to recover.

As of this writing (June 22), the potatoes are so lush and beautiful that I will often just pause and admire them (Don and Older Daughter never miss the opportunity to tease me about that). They're doing even better in these grow bags than in the garden in our old place. 

I'm thrilled at the thought of what's happening at the root level. How many tubers will we be able to harvest per bag? That remains to be seen, but I'm optimistic.

In fact, assuming this experiment is a success, I'll continue using grow bags for indeterminate potatoes even after we get the raised-bed garden built (which, by the way, is a project I'll post about shortly). So far I'm impressed with them!

Planting potatoes

Last year, I tried an experiment: planting potatoes in grow bags. It was an unmitigated disaster, but not for the reasons you'd think. Rather, I blame two things: a poor choice of location, and poor soil.

The location was a narrow strip of land behind our shed, between the shed and the pasture fence.

It seemed logical: fairly protected, close to water, and out of the way. What could possibly go wrong? After a LOT of hard work, I got the potatoes planted in the grow bags (these are twenty-gallon bags, by the way).

At first they grew well, but then several things happened. One, as spring advanced into summer and the weather grew drier and hotter, it quickly became apparent that the topsoil we'd used was more like "top clay." Even though I watered diligently, the poor potatoes were baked into hard clay and had a difficult time growing.

And two, clay is heavy. When I tried to "mound" the potatoes by topping off the grow bags with more dirt, I could barely heave the clay-soil into the bags. Since one side was blocked by the shed wall, I couldn't access the back bags. I ended up just dumping the clay-soil over the potato plants from a distance instead of carefully mounding, which just buried the poor things. Bottom line, they all died. It was very discouraging.

This year, I was determined to mend my mistakes. I'm still enamored with the grow bags and feel they are an excellent alternative to growing potatoes in the ground or in raised beds. This past week, here's what I did.

The first thing I did was removed the bags, emptied them, and relocated them to a better spot. At first I thought it would be a simple matter of using a hand truck to remove each grow bag, but that idea quickly went south. Those bags must have weighed 200 lbs. each (remember, twenty gallons of heavy wet clay!) and I couldn't so much as budge them.

Instead, I laboriously dug the clay-soil from each bag with a shovel, one at a time, and put the clay-soil into the gorilla cart. After fifteen or twenty shovel-fulls, the bag was low enough that I could lift it and dump the remaining soil into the cart.

In this, I had (ahem) lots of help from Mr. Darcy.

One by one, I removed the bags and revealed the pallets on which they'd rested. I removed the pallets and placed them in the front of the house, alongside the Nuclear Strawberry beds, because they would be easy to fence in.

This is a temporary spot, but that's okay. Pallets are easy to move.

Above all, I wanted to make sure I could access the grow bags from all sides for ease of filling. To this end, I made a sort of cloverleaf formation with the pallets.

The next step was to improve the clay-soil. Fortunately we have a mound of compost...

...and a mound of sand we purchased last fall for purposes of amending soil (sadly, far too late to help last year's potatoes).

To a grow bag's worth of clay-soil, I added ten shovels full of compost and five shovels full of sand. Note the dramatic color difference between the clay-soil (at left) and compost (at right).

Then I mixed it all together. I flippin' LOVE using sand to break up clay. It's wonderful stuff. Together with the compost, the result of these efforts was a lovely rich friable soil.

As I emptied the grow bags, I relocated them to their new spot and filled them with about four inches of this soil mixture. To aid in that, I used a cut-off bottomless old garbage can as a funnel, which holds the mouth of the grow bags open while I shovel dirt into them.

 

This whole process was slow and took place over several days, also factoring in some rainy weather.

Meanwhile, I had a lot of seed potatoes – probably too many.

I have twenty grow bags, so I divvied the potatoes into twenty piles.

Then, for each pile, I cut the larger potatoes into two or three pieces, and left the smaller potatoes intact, for a total of six pieces per pile. I had a lot of seed potatoes, so I could afford not to be parsimonious.

I let them dry for a day or two...

...until the cut side was toughened up a bit. This helps prevent potatoes from rotting in the dirt.

By the way, these are russet potatoes, an indeterminate variety.  This means they grow in multiple layers and benefit from being mounded. In lieu of mounding, they will be "buried" up to their necks twice during the growing season.

On planting day, I placed six pieces in each grow bag.

Then, using the garbage-can funnel, I covered the pieces with about four inches of that lovely friable soil mixture.

For the time being, that's all I have to do. We had rain the day after I planted, so they're thoroughly watered.

Sometimes the side of a grow bag wants to collapse inward...

...so I'll prop it up with sticks.

This won't be an issue later in the season as I "mound" more soil in the grow bags.

In the next couple of weeks, we'll bring in more horse panels and widen the fencing to encompass both the strawberry beds and the potato grow bags, to prevent the deer from munching the plants.

 

I'm confident the potatoes will grow better this year. For one thing, they're in much better soil. For another thing, I can "mound" the soil more carefully around the plants since I can access them from all sides, instead of trying to dump clay-soil from a distance. Time will tell.

It feels good to take a step toward growing things, even if the proper garden isn't built yet.