I love early spring planting! You can’t plant just anything – the warm season crops still need to wait for the last frost to be well past. But in many climates you are safe to plant cool-weather crops like onion sets, potatoes, shallots, peas and others. “Plant your peas on President’s Day” and “Plant your potatoes on St Patrick’s Day” are a couple old garden sayings
Edible Groundcovers
I’m excited to begin the design process at our new house and grateful for the blank slate yard that gives us a fresh start. The garden will likely emphasize edibles and I’m compiling a list of favorites. Here are some of my favorites. Thyme is a tough, evergreen ground cover. Cultivated varieties come in tiny, tight-to-the-ground plants or taller, cascading plants. Rosemary is great, hardy
The Case for Boring Vegetables
My first years of gardening really focused on the divas of the produce world: tomatoes, pepper, eggplant and melons. Those are the plants that want a hot climate (something the mild NW can barely provide) and lots of water. They are the plants we garden nerds coo and crow over with one another, talking about which sexy varieties we’re adding this season. As the years
Planting Potatoes: The Double Dig Method
St Patrick’s Day is usually my cue that potatoes need to be planted. You can still get your spuds in and have a decent harvest, but it needs to happen soon! Potatoes can be easily grown in something as simple as a bucket full of soil with drainage holes in the bottom. Although they are adaptable to lots of growing methods, the double-dig method has
Prolific Potato Tires
After planting about 2-3 seed potatoes per tire and stacking them three tires high throughout the season, my end yield from this experiment was about 1 1/2-5 pounds of potato. This seemed to depend a lot on the variety. The russets were by far the best performer, followed by the Yukon Golds. The fingerlings were the least prolific, but the tastiest. I decided to continue
More Potatoes
Last year I tried an experiment with growing potatoes in tires and it seemed to work okay. Of the five varieties I planted, most seemed to produce a ton of potatoes in the first tire, a few in the second, and none in the third. I saved a couple of each variety from the harvest and decided to replant them this year. The main reason
Potato Tires Harvest
Several months ago I began the experiment of growing potatoes in recycled tires. It seemed like a good, logical idea. Growing potatoes requires occasional mounding of the soil as the green stalks grow, resulting in more potatoes. So why not do this in a very linear way while re-using old tires at the same time? I should put it out there that I have never
Potato Tires: Final Stack
This summer I am trying out the method of intensively growing potatoes in old tires. I wrote about it back in this post if you want more details. Essentially the goal is to grow more potatoes in less space, and reuse some old tires in the process. So far, so good with the tires experiment. I am growing five different varieties of potatoes: Fingerling Russian
Potato Tire Stacks: Progress
This past winter I decided to try growing potatoes in tires. I have never grown potatoes before, mainly because it seems they take up a lot of space. Living in a small urban lot, space is a premium. The method is basically planting 2-3 seed potatoes per tire. Once the leaves get high, you add another tire and fill with dirt, leaving about 4″ of