Finally, something in the ground

I finally got something planted last night - potatoes. Below is a picture I took this morning showing the fruits of my labor. (I took it about 6:45 AM, just before the sun came up, so it's a bit dark.)

The freshly-dug bed on the right holds two fingerling varieties of potato: French Fingerling and Rose Finn Apple. The bed with the trellises has a potato trench in the back, filled with Purple Viking, a general purpose white potato with purple skin. The far left bed doesn't have anything - just extra dirt from the Purple Viking trench. This year I decided to go with more "exotic" varieties than I did last year (Kennebec and Norland). I figured the fun of growing them at home is to have something I couldn't find easily at the grocery store or market.

In the fingerling bed, I planted the potatoes right down the middle. I will plant bush beans along each side after I push the dirt back into the trench. This was an idea from Great Garden Companions by Sally Jean Cunningham. According to the book, the potatoes and beans should repel each other's insect enemies.

Along with planting the potatoes, I set up the trellises for peas and beans (see picture below). I built the tall trellis in 2004, and it's still working well. This will be for the snap peas and pole beans. I decided to try something different for the shelling peas - old tomato cages with extra twine.

Besides planting potatoes and setting up the trellises last night, I had also planned to plant the peas, along with beets, lettuce, spinach, carrots and onions. However, by 7:45 pm it was getting dark, so I'll have to do that on Thursday night.

Before I went in the house, I experienced one more first for the day - the first mosquito bite of the season. I guess that's the trade-off for temps in the 70's.

Comments

[cricketann]

mmmm....velvety, black earth: my favorite.