Potatoes

Garden Update

My potato patch before round three of mulching - we mulched it just before it started pouring!

Greens patch: Lettuce, chard, beets, turnips, radishes, carrots, and parsnips.

The hail and tornados missed us! I'm so very grateful for this!!! At present I have no way to protect my tomatoes. John has an idea and we will set it up sometime this week.

Garden Update

The potato patch has been mulched, I beat the rain this time. One of the upsides to checking the potatoes was I found something was munching on the leaves so tomorrow it's off to the gardening store for some organic bug stuff to kill off the buggies. Otherwise hubby is threatening to use Sevin on everything and that is the last resort around here.

Ready to Go!!!

My poor neglected garlic patch, I have two of them actually. Hopefully next week I'll be able to dig the patch up and seperate it out so they will actually produce sizable bulbs this year. Leeks and onion seeds are going in next week as well, again if we don't end up with a nasty blizzard tomorrow.


Now that John is finished doing his thing, tilling, I can put up the fence again this will help to keep the rabbits away from my grape vine which they tend to ravage and very quickly. Picture below YES that really is a tree growing in the middle of my garden. I could opt to remove it but it provides a LOT of shade on my house hence reducing the need for central air in the summer. It's a crab apple, I've been working on guilds to plant around the tree it would appear that there are a lot of plants, including vegetables that love apple trees.

North Garden below East Garden above, Native Prairie Garden to the right of the sidewalk.

My garden spots have been tilled, just 2 inches to break the large clumps of horse manure apart and to mix it in with the leaves, and are ready to go! Now barring any major blizzards which we may or may not get next week I'll plant my potatoes, peas, kale, chard, mustard greens, and rhutabegas.

Canning Potatoes



And dealing with all of that starch! There are very few things I remember from Home Ec, taken from 1981-1984 and this was one of them!


Cube your potatoes and rinse, you may have to rinse them twice, drain.

Place potatoes into a container and cover with COLD water, I used a 2 gallon bucket.

To this add 1/4 cup of vinegar.
If you use a smaller container then reduce your vinegar.
The potatoes will have a clearish look to them after soaking. I soaked mine for 4 hours but overnight yeilds the best results.

Potato Bin

John planted some potatoes in this bin with straw, this is a new experiment for us, will let you know how it turns out.

The idea behind this potato growing method is as the starter potatoes send up shoots you put more straw, and another round of wood (or tires) and you keep doing this until you are ready to harvest. This is supposed to encourage more potatoes and less vines.