Into the dirt!
Best thing about today, is that I got to PLANT SEEDS! It's a little untraditional to plant summer crops in July, but our weather should allow everything to come up.
Here's a quick view of the last two raised beds that I needed to get cleared out. After clearing them out and cleaning up behind the beds (yellow buckets and blue tub, plus a plethora of weeds along the back side of the bed), I had lots of seeds to plant too!
Now that makes me feel better! Love how it looks! I do have to say it was a heck of a workout too! In the right hand bed, I planted a row of radishes in the front, then a row of carrots next, a row of lettuce and finally, at the back of the bed, a row of bush beans. The beans will be able to be managed with the trellis in the bed.
We'll see how they do. The carrots I planted from this pack of seeds, earlier in the season, never sprouted, and the lettuce row I sowed, only had two plants sprout - neither really did anything. I'm hoping I just had a little too much manure in the other bed. Here's hoping!!
The left hand bed, we prepped for potatoes. I had some sprouted potatoes from the store. The ones I planted today are Russet potatoes. They take 90 - 130 days to harvest, but that will only be mid-late October. In my climate, it should still be plenty warm.
For those of you who don't know, you can grow potatoes from the ones you get at the store. While some companies spray the potatoes with a growth inhibitor (to keep them from sprouting), the ones I purchased sprouted in the bag after just a few weeks. They were either in the store for a LONG time, or they have no inhibitor on them. Either way, we'll see what we get!. I dug trenches for the them, plopped them into rows and covered and watered! Pretty excited to get plants in all the beds!
Make sure when you drop them, the eyes are up - what that means is make sure the area with the sprouts is facing up. If you look closely at the picture below, you can see that the sprouted areas of the potatoes are facing up.
Lot's of folks will cut the potatoes into sections so that each section has one to two eyes. This will allow for many more plants. If you do cut them up, you'll need to let them sit out a couple of days so that the cut edges can dry out. This will prevent rot and critters. This is an experimental bed for us, so I just threw them in whole. We get what we get! Ha!
All in all a pretty awesome and productive day. I must say I was HOT after getting done working in the yard. I like to work in the mornings, when I have the most energy, and then rest / do inside work in the afternoons. That's what I'm doing today. After I finish this post, I'm off to the kitchen to make Rouladen for dinner. This is the recipe I'm trying - Authentic German Rouladen. For those that don't know - I was raised in Germany, and I LOVE German food. So excited to try this recipe....we'll have it with turnips! Yum!
