Posts Tagged ‘soil moisture’

Planting Potatoes

We’ve been planting potatoes, which is a particularly back-breaking task as we’re doing almost everything by hand.  The way I’ve grown potatoes before, and seems to work well here, is to dig a fairly deep trench and plant the potatoes in the bottom, so that as they grow you can hill them directly into the trench with the loose dirt on the sides.  It makes for less work in the future, but a lot of digging presently.  I am grateful though that the soil is the perfect moisture at the moment, and it will only be several weeks or so until it is dry and rock hard…. It is the best time of year to be digging.

We dug out some mammoth rocks, I wish I had pictures of them, but I didn’t have the camera today.  Needless to say it took a lot of time and effort to dig out rocks the size of my torso.  Even though we had a tractor rip and disc our field in  the fall, and we pulled out a lot of rocks at that time, we are still unfortunately finding them.  This area was  part of an old volcanic mud flow that deposited lots and lots of rocks, but in strange ways, so that half of our row will be full of rocks, and the other half will be completely rock free.  It makes for interesting digging at least.  There is also a very old rock wall that runs along side one of the creeks bordering the field, so you can see this has been done before.

I am really looking forward to potatoes, one of my favorite things to grow.   They’re like harvesting jewels in the soil, so many colors and surprising shapes.  All this digging will be worthwhile!

My next post will be about… FUNGUS, which I’m getting really excited about and seems to be the new miracle way to improve soil health.