5/4/2009 - Potato Leaves Coming Up

I planted my potatoes, what, about two weeks ago. I didn't really have any idea when to expect any green things to pop up from beneath the soil or what they would look like when they did. A couple of days ago I was looking at the bed and noticed a few little tiny leaves. I wasn't sure if they were weeds or if they were coming from the potatoes, so I left them alone. This morning I went out again to check them out and they had gotten much bigger and more like real leaves. I was pretty excited. Here are a few pictures I took of them. I think the darker colored ones are from the all-blue variety that Hillary gave me, and the others are either from a yellow potato she also gave me, or from the red ones that I got from People's. Woohoo! I really enjoy this gardening stuff.

5/4/2009 - Bed #2: Onions, Lettuce & Carrots

The forecast for last weekend was for rain all day Saturday and Sunday, but it was nice and sunny on Friday! So, I left work at 3:00pm that afternoon and stopped by Dennis' Seven Dees Garden Center on Powell to buy some onion starts. I ended up buying three different types, which gave me a ridiculous number of them--way more than I could possibly use. Thankfully I think my friends Tasha and Melanie can use some and my friend Hillary said she would take whatever I had left. (She actually has enough room for all of them at her little farm). Anyway, after picking those up I headed home and worked as quickly as possible to set and level my second raised bed, add another 2x4 around the top like I did with the first one, and fill it with dirt--specifically a mix of horse manure compost, construction sand and the clay soil we have in the back yard--all before the sun went down. My niece Allie kept me company and helped with all the dirt-moving. She loved it.

So, I got the last wheelbarrow of soil into the bed right at dusk, cleaned everything up and headed in for the night, where I stayed up until 3:00am obsessing over what to plant in the bed and how to lay it all out. I was trying to think about which plants would go well together and came up with a layout involving 48 onions, two tomato plants and about four square feet of carrots. I read that onions and carrots like to be near each other and both enjoy the partial shade in the heat of the summer provided by the tall tomato plants. I was pretty happy with my plan, if a little worried that I was crowding the tomatoes a bit, but with that I went to sleep.

In the morning, well... afternoon, when I got outside to get to work I saw just how many onions I really had bought, and decided to scrap my plan and plant a lot more onions. That was maybe a dumb idea, but I couldn't stand to waste all the onions I got. So, I ended up planting four rows of each type that I got, which turned out to be 114 onions! Yeah, that's a lot for a backyard garden. But I guess we'll just have lots to give away.  :)  In the remaining space I decided to transplant the first lettuce seedlings I started along with a little section where I sowed a smattering of carrot seeds.

I finished it all off by making signs for the things I planted with some shims my dad had in the garage that were just the right size and shape. The weather was crazy that day, and shortly after I finished up in the rain a fairly intense (if short) storm blew in complete with thunder and really strong winds. So, I didn't really need to water anything! The plants weathered the storm beautifully, and I was very pleased looking out and seeing my first bed planted with things I could actually see above the soil.  :)

4/21/2009 - Pythagoras and Potatoes

This past weekend I got my first veggies in the ground! On Friday night I cut my seed potatoes and set them out with a fan on them so the cut edges could scab over before I put them in the ground. Then I grabbed some graph paper and started to figure out my layout. I am basing my plant spacing off of the suggestions in The Sustainable Vegetable Garden, and it recommends what it refers to as offset or hexagonal spacing. Basically, draw a grid of hexagons and put a plant at each vertex and in the center of each. This spacing technique is designed to allow more plants per square foot over the traditional row spacing as well as other benefits related to the fact that the leaves from the plants are closer to each other forming a canopy of sorts that serves as a natural mulch to keep moisture in and weeds out. It took me a little while to figure out practically what that would look like--I had to pull out some algebra and trig. I used the Pythagorean Theorem to figure out what the distance would be from the center of the hexagon to each edge. I figured out that this distance (X) can be calculated as follows, where L is the distance from the center of the hexagon to any of its vertices (which is the spacing given by the book, 9 inches for potatoes): X = squareRoot(3/4) * L. So, effectively you have rows of potatoes where each potato is 9 inches apart, where every other row is shifted by 4 1/2 inches, and the rows themselves are about 7 3/4 apart, as given by that formula (well, 7.794... technically). Who wouldda thought planting potatoes would involve so much math! It was fun figuring it out.

Anyway, so I drew out the layout to scale and figured out that I could get 32 seed potato pieces in the four by six foot bed, and that worked out great because I had 34 available. While I was doing that my dad was trying to figure out some technical stuff of his own for a job he was doing on Saturday. When both of us finished our thinking and drawing I showed my dad the layout and we talked about how to actually implement it in the bed. He suggested putting marks on the long sides of the beds where each row would go (7 3/4 inches apart) and then putting marks 4 1/2 inches apart on a board that I could slide across to line up with each row mark. That's what I ended up doing and it worked wonderfully. I tied a piece of potato on a length of twine to use as a plumb bob and used that and the marked board to place each potato where it was supposed to go. I'm sure you all think I'm crazy being so exact on this, but that's just how I think, and it's easier for me if I can do it by some formula rather than just guessing.

So, on Saturday I got out the shovel and the level and set the beginnings of the raised bed to where it was more or less level. Then I added a two by four on top all the way around to make it about thirteen inches high all together. Then I mixed some of my clay soil with a lot of the composted horse manure that I got from our family friends Randy and Kathy Arn a couple of weeks ago and filled the bed to about four inches deep or so. That was all I had time for that day, and I wanted to give the potatoes one more day to scab over, so I actually did the planting on Sunday. After putting the potatoes where they were supposed to go and taking some pictures, I covered them with four to six inches or so of the same clay soil and composted horse manure mixture I put in the day before. It was a pretty fun experience and the weather was great for it. Next up, hopefully onions and carrots!