Planting potatoes (on my birthday)

I spent my birthday in garden. And that's actually a good thing. First of all it meant the weather was nice. Secondly I do enjoy it, so it was a treat. Potatoes are kind of a Casey crop focus after my experiment last year and my focus on growing volume of calories.

Potatoes were crowded out of the expanded garden by many varieties of a lot of fun stuff, but I insisted on potatoes. Having already invested in the materials for a lot of new raised beds for this season, we are trying something different. We had read about growing potatoes in bags so that you can gradually fill up the bag with soil as the potatoes continue to grow up. This "hilling" process can be done on flat ground if you have enough soil to gather up, but we don't (screw this cherty clay). Our experiment this year is going to be round mounds. Three of them, at the ends of the rows of raised beds. The idea will be to add soil (cross fingers that we will find more compost) to them gradually during the growing season and end up with a mound of potatoes. I think we are going to make chicken wire walls to help hold the mounds together.

4' diameter circle, basically just dug over 4-6 inches deep. Left the sod in to decompose. This was the first one...middle grade in the crappy soil quality of the three circles.

Nearly all of this chert came from the second bed....horrible cherty clay soil. Most likely from a pad of clay laid for the foundation of the house when it was built. The red clay around here is the leftover residue of millions of years of erosion of limestone with thin layers of chert in between. The limestone dissolves almost completely leaving behind the cherty clay. Ugh.....

Each broken up clay circle got two inches of the chunky compost scraped from the raised beds.

First bed is 13 generic red potatoes.

Second bed is 6 generic purple up front and 6 generic red in the back.

Third bed is 8 Yukon Gold at the front and 5 generic red at the back.

I spread about 3 inches of this mixture on top of the potatoes. This is the chunky compost scraped off the tops of the raised beds plus the remnants of the leaf piles that were attempted to shelter the soil from the winter weather.

The three potato beds. Chicken wire walls to come later.