Potato Planting

The weather is going through an indecisive phase right now and has been swinging back and forth between warm sunny days and cloudy, cold wet days with a variety of snow and rain.  The warm days were nice enough that I decided to try to get a little spring planting in starting with my potatoes.  I still had quite a few potatoes left from last fall's harvest and a bunch of them were well on their way to becoming potato plants again.  The sprouting eyes were nearly a foot long in some cases and they were just begging to be planted so that they can grow again.

I had already started turning over some of the garden beds that the chickens had "tilled" for me this winter and this year's crop of potatoes was planted where last year's cucumbers had grown.  The dirt in this bed was nice and fluffy and I dug three trenches for this collection of seed potatoes.  Each trench received a different variety.  Yukon golds went down the middle.

 The Purple Vikings went down the east side and the Red Chieftains went down the west side.

Once I had all the spuds where I wanted them, I back filled the trenches and leveled out the bed with a rake.  The next stage was setting up the drip lines for this bed and then covering the whole thing with straw.  The straw will help insulate the potatoes from wild temperature swings and helps to hold precious moisture in the soil.  I expect to see sprouts appearing on the surface in a few weeks from now and am already looking forward to this year's potato harvest.  Potatoes have become a staple in my diet just because they are so easy to grow and store very well in the right conditions.