Never Quite Caught Up

This weekend was a busy one.  We got two inches of rain, but it was either fast-moving, or happened overnight, so I was able to work quite a bit still.  The biggest thing that I got done this weekend was to mulch my potatoes.  I hilled them with composted manure last week, and just now got around to mulching them.  I use waste hay, because it's available in large quantity, and it's dumped to compost in extreme proximity to the garden. 

In previous years, we've tried growing potatoes in a trench and filling in dirt as the plants grew, but we've had limited success with this method.   The benefit of that is that extra material is not needed to hill around the plants.  You simply use what was dug out of the trench to backfill.  Two years ago, my father tried this method and got a great yield.  For the last two years, however, we have not had nearly the experience that my father has.  I suspect that the flaws with this method are that we have rather heavy soil, and compaction is further encouraged by the digging and backfilling, and that by continually covering up the growing stems and foliage, the plant is weakened.  Then it takes longer to recuperate before growing nice tubers.  Instead, I chose to use a hilling method.  I buried my seed potatoes rather shallow; maybe 2 inches deep.  Once the first stems broke the surface, the plants grew vigorously!  Once they had reached their full height, I began hilling around their bases.  By the time I finished with the hay mulch yesterday, I noticed that many of the plants were blooming quite robustly, as I've never had potato plants do before.  I'll have to keep my eye of the hay level over the plants because I suspect that it will compact and break down rapidly throughout the summer, potentially leaving my tubers exposed to sunlight. 

Yesterday evening, I picked spinach, as it's starting to bolt.  I will replace it with New Zealand Spinach in the coming days.  This is a big event for me, because successfully growing spinach was #2 of my 2 garden goals this year.  The first goal has yet to be accomplished, but it's a long way off anyway. 

Washed and ready to eat!

I've always had trouble germinating spinach, and it's because I didn't understand the plant.  Usually I attempted to start it with my other brassicas, under moist, light, and relatively warm conditions.  This was a mistake.  This year, I did a little research.  I soaked the spinach seeds in water for 24 hours, and then put the seeds into plastic baggies with a wet paper towel, and then put that in the refrigerator until I saw their little white shoots coming out.  At that point, I probably could have set them in the garden to do their thing, but I wanted to keep a closer eye on them, so I arranged them in a flat tray and put it under lights in my living room until they had real leaves.  Then I set them out in the garden.  All of this happened late in the season of course, but I'm happy to have had a success!