Gardening 2019...

[bwframe]

I tried a little patch of straw potatoes last year, just straw or hay bed rotting on the ground, you simply plug potatoes I to it and they come back out pretty easy.
The only issue I had was some that were sunburned...

That's the way I always did mine. You have to pile the grass higher than you think you need and maybe do it again a few weeks later, after settling.

It's great to be able to sneak potatoes out as needed. A bonus is the missed ones often turn into next year's first yield.

My diet changed and I didn't do potatoes last year. Man I miss them.

 

[JeepHammer]

I like baby potatoes in things, anything from marble size on up, straw is a good way to sneak them out for that.

Got any secrets you care to share with straw bedding? I'm new to it...

 

[bwframe]

Straw bedding was the "lazy" way when I started doing it. No shovel work!

I'd till the ground or not depending on whether it had been worked or not before. Going on the lazy theme, I'd drop the whole potatoes where I wanted the plants, 18ish" apart. Always tried to buy (or save) small seed potatoes rather than cut up eyes.

Straw is supposed to be best for mulch, but I never had access or funds for it. Always used hay, it too can get pricey. Best affordable bet for me was always to have big round bails delivered or rolled from the pasture next door. Old semi-rotten bails are great and affordable or free. You need to pile it deep to mulch off the weed seed and maintain the edges. 3-4' deep hay settles to around a foot.

The potatoes grow on top of or halfway into the ground. Move the grass off and pick them up. You can start sneaking small potatoes out 1-3 at a time, without killing the plant, after the plants blossom.

I liked to put in a big bed, so sacrificing plants for small potatoes was no big deal. Like tomato plants, more means a yield of some sort, even on bad years. Taking potatoes as needed also lets you keep abreast of issues like scab, rot, bugs, ground parasites and varmints.

It took years for me to figure how to be successful with potatoes yields at my current location. Lots of sun also dried out the bed quickly. Building the bed to dam rain water flow, along with the heavy mulch, proved successful. The other end of that is potatoes rot quicker laying wet.

I like to grow mostly the expensive varieties that you see in the grocery to attempt to recover the time/labor invested. A yellow, a red and a white was always good in case something went wrong with that specific variety.

The golds typically rot quicker, the reds there after, whites not so much. Reds get scab and look bad, but it peals off. I prefer to eat the skin, whenever it's possible. Whites are often russets or the like. No matter what you do, it's hard to match grocery store pricing for russets.

Growing potatoes would not be worth it if you just grow russets. That said, it's hard to beat ANY potato fresh out of the garden.

 

[Expat]

I have been receiving seed catalogs. Always enjoyable reading through them.

 

[JeepHammer]

I grew 4 kinds last year, one that made good small potatoes I added to green beans and stew.
They were easy to get out of the straw, poking around until I found the right sizes.

I don't skin anything but the bitter browns.

Did you do onions the same way? I'm trying onions this spring to see if they do as well.

 

[Expat]

I never did the straw thing. I plant them 4 inches under and then hill them up a couple of times as they grow. I used to spend time getting small ones out early. Now I just start digging the row and use them as I need them. I don't think it makes all that much difference. But I plant a couple of 50-60 foot rows.

 

[JeepHammer]

Well... Crapola!
Got ready to move seedlings to hot boxes and it snowed.

I'm SO READY to see something grow!

 

[chevyguy]

Does anyone think that peppers and tomatos will do any good this year? Everyone I talked to had the same issue as me, shriveled tomato plants and peckish pepper plants.

 

[BigBoxaJunk]

I've had good years and bad with tomatoes, sometimes even when I'm working at it, I have a bad season. For me, gardening in clay, a wet season is the worst, with blight eventually taking down all my plants.

But, with peppers, with plants I start from seed, I've only had bad seasons in the very wettest years. Last year wasn't so good, but I really lost my motivation last season and they did poorly from lack of attention. Although I have started getting deer damage, and they seem to love pepper plants, so this year I may put up a fence.

 

[JeepHammer]

For me, it's soil prep instead of just plugging them into 'Dirt'...

Want water to drain, add pea gravel.
Want the soil to retain moisture and not hold water, add styrofoam beads.
Clay too hard, add sand & styrofoam.
Want to cut down on fertilizers that can burn up plants and cause 'Blight', use compost instead of chemical fertilizer.
Want to control ground water & bugs, raise your garden beds up off the ground.

I cover my rased beds in winter so rain/snow doesn't wash out nutrients.
Raised beds keep me from standing on my head, and with somewhere to sit weeding is MUCH easier.

Raised beds with corner posts allow for netting, which keeps bugs/birds off the produce.
You won't believe how many bugs you avoid in raised beds.
This is a big deal with strawberries, what the bugs & birds don't carry off, the ground fungus rots...
Raised beds with nets avoids nearly 100% of this.

 

[stocknup]

For me, it's soil prep instead of just plugging them into 'Dirt'...

Want water to drain, add pea gravel.
Want the soil to retain moisture and not hold water, add styrofoam beads.
Clay too hard, add sand & styrofoam.
Want to cut down on fertilizers that can burn up plants and cause 'Blight', use compost instead of chemical fertilizer.
Want to control ground water & bugs, raise your garden beds up off the ground.

I cover my rased beds in winter so rain/snow doesn't wash out nutrients.
Raised beds keep me from standing on my head, and with somewhere to sit weeding is MUCH easier.

Raised beds with corner posts allow for netting, which keeps bugs/birds off the produce.
You won't believe how many bugs you avoid in raised beds.
This is a big deal with strawberries, what the bugs & birds don't carry off, the ground fungus rots...
Raised beds with nets avoids nearly 100% of this.

Raised beds for me as well ......but will be starting from scratch this year . The Voles pretty much destroyed last year`s root crops .
Will be adding drip irrigation and lining the bottoms with hardware cloth .

 

[JeepHammer]

For me, it's boards around the outside, 4x4 posts in the corners, concrete blocks in the bottom with drain cloth over that and then soil.
I screwed flat boards on the top so I can sit down (bad back) and that made things MUCH easier.

My compost/soil takes about 2 years unless you buy bagged soil to start with, which I did way back when until I figured compost out.
I'm on sand or yellow clay, so no rich top soil. Took a bit to figure that out too.

I use drip watering lines since everything drains so well, and I'm partial to cardboard/news print for weed control since it rots in a year and tills right into the soil in the spring.
I like strawberries so I stapled gutters to the upright posts and grow strawberries in the gutters, netting on the outside.
That works really well and I get more berries when the vines hang.
Berries are a water control thing, along with birds, bugs & fungus/rot.

 

[BigBoxaJunk]

When I made my first beds 15+ years ago, I used 2x6 boards salvaged from a deck that I took down, and pile of clay dirt left over from building our house. The boards were ten footers, so I made the beds 20' long and 4' wide, with three feet left in between, since I figured that was the tightest space that I could still maneuver my wheel barrow. The first year, they were one-board high, but since I had more old boards, the next year I made them two 2x6's high. I just screwed the long boards to the end boards, and used new pressure-treated 2x4 stakes at each corner and one in the middle to keep them straight. One year, I took some landscaping fabric, cut the roll in half lengthwise with my bandsaw, and used the 18" fabric to line the inside of each bed to hold the soil from washing out through the cracks between the old boards. I've never had any trouble with voles in my beds, although rabbits occasionally get my spring greens and pea sprouts (one rabbit can take down an entire pea crop), and just these past couple of years, I've had trouble with deer eating my pepper plants. This year, I'm gonna try Mom45's idea of tying old walmart bags to flap in the wind and see if that keeps the dear away.

Since I started with a pretty hard clay soil, I also set up several composting bins using left-over 1"x2" welded wire fencing, making cylinders about 4' high (the height of the fencing) and about 3' in diameter. I'd fill those with leaves, grass clippings, pulled weeds, kitchen scraps, and all of the leftover stuff from each seasons canning. After 15 years of adding compost to my beds, I've gotten to the point where my soil is good. With a raised bed, drainage is no problem at all, and I have to water the beds more than my garden in the ground. The clay holds water well and is a very fertile soil, and with all of the organic matter I've added, my beds are full of worms, and it's loose enough to dig in with my hands almost like potting soil in some places.

I've used drip irrigation lines in the past, and I'm probably going to improve on that system this year. I've got a 300-or-so gallon rain water storage tank and I'd like to fix up a pump to use the rain water in my irrigation system. I also use a lot of mulch each season. I put a thick layer of straw down when I plant my tomato plants, and on the strawberries, and I use leaves on everything else, as thick as I can, depending on the size of the plants.

I've added beds over the years and now I have 12 beds 20'x4'. I have several dedicated to Asparagus, Horseradish, Rhubarb, and Strawberries. I also plant garlic cloves, from part of that year's harvest, each fall about the time the leaves are down. I cover those with a thick layer of leaves and cover it all with plastic fencing, laid flat to keep the leaves from blowing off. It's about time to take the fencing up now and the plants will be spiking up soon.

 

[JeepHammer]

That's great!
I raised my beds up higher simply because I didn't want to bend over, bad back.
Sit on the ledge, reach half way across and move to the other side.
Having a bad back sucks, but I wasn't doing without a garden.
It's probably high enough rabbits can't get in unless they are REALLY motivated...

I got a call about 'Varmints' from a local that knew I shoot, in one day a ground hog took down about 1/4 acre of melons that were emerging, and he had a couple dozen ground hogs.
A few of us went out and 'Dispatched' the ground hogs, it was actually fun to sit out there, BS, get some sun and remove those pests.
I wouldn't want to try and catch a single rabbit since they work as much at night as they do in the daytime, and a single rabbit would be easy to miss coming or going... That sounds like a full time job to me...

I still do corn and a bunch of other stuff at ground level, I have mostly sand and it's good for melons, corn, pickles, cabbage, etc.
The issues with sand is water, but drip water lines solved that, I have low cost/effort water, so it's not a big issue, but bugs like sand and I put bug prone stuff up in beds.
It took a while to learn what goes where, but everything comes in pretty good now about every year.

Shading my tomatoes with netting, just that little bit of shade, helped last year.
I do the old style plants that throw tomatoes until a hard frost, and I had more than I needed last year while a lot of people didn't do so well.
I noticed some sunburning, so I dropped the net to slightly shade them and the sunburn went away, and they REALLY took off again.
Some of the older, thin skinned types sunburn easier than others, and that's what I like best.

My peas failed last year, probably my fault since I went a little more acidic than usual.
I had a killer year for peas two years in a row, so we aren't low, but I think I screwed the pooch putting them in a high acid bed last year.
One thing about beds, you can control the pH better than at ground level.
My green beans took over last year, all the beans did well. I canned/dried beans until I was sick of seeing them, then took at crap load to the food bank.
I thought they weren't ever going to stop...
That's a tip, the local food banks will give you a big tax credit slip for your taxes when you donate excess, usually more than retail price.

I would like to do a bucket garden, lift the water bucket up and things get watered, run off goes into another bucket and you swap buckets.
Kind of a hydroponics thing, you don't loose fertilizers that way. I haven't tried it but it looks cool, I just think a longer (maybe plastic?) tub/bin would be better than a bucket for a growing bed.
The idea of nearly zero losses appeals to me, and swapping buckets also appeals to me, no pumping water other than replacing what the plants use.

I saw a strawberry setup using gutters that recovered the water at the other end.
Water goes in from raised bucket at one end, recovered in a lowered bucket at the other end.
The next time they watered, they simply reversed the bucket, lower the high, raised the lowered and the plants were watered again.
That seems stupid simple to me, but I'm sure I'm missing something... A rope, pulley flexible hose and bucket on each end can't be all there is to it...?

I know people roll their eyes when I rattle on about my gardens...
I guess it's not 'Extreme' enough for most people, but I SERIOUSLY enjoy it!
I can park my butt in a lawn chair with a glass of sweet tea and just watch things grow, just a sense of satisfaction I don't get from a lot of other stuff.
I also connect seeing that produce with dinner, fresh or canned, and that gives me a sense of accomplishment also.

 

[1DOWN4UP]

. Here is my garlic patch.They are just starting to pop thru the straw.

 

[JeepHammer]

Is that just composting straw or did you do something else to the bed?

 

[Leadeye]

I have had very good luck controlling fungus on everything from grapes to tomato with copper sulfate solutions.

 

[chemteach]

Raised beds for my tomatoes. Horse manure in the fall over everything. Finely ground egg shells help prevent end rot on tomatoes and help keep some pests away. We seem to do well with peas, green beans and potatoes but, the pure pleasure of picking and devouring that first garden-fresh tomato is worth all the work and all the waiting.

 

[BigBoxaJunk]

I have had very good luck controlling fungus on everything from grapes to tomato with copper sulfate solutions.

How often do you apply it to your tomatoes and at what point do you start?

 

[spencer rifle]

Sprouting peas this week.

We finally had to give up on drip irrigation - our water is so bad that it clogs the emitters with calcium and iron and they stop working. Probably have to go to sprinklers now.

We know what to do with Japanese beetles this year: pick them off the peas, beans and hazelnut bushes and feed them to the chickens - they absolutely love them.