I was bonding with my Irish roots today as I planted the first potatoes. I was also bonding with my German Catholic neighbors, from whom I learned it’s traditional to plant potatoes on Good Friday.
Although Maurice and Rita Palmersheim say there is definitely wiggle room on this, and it’s ok to plant them a week or two later, I really wanted to get at least a few potatoes in the ground today. As it was I planted 20 yukon gold seed potatoes that I bought from the local nursery.
What you see at right is my crooked row.
I learned how to plant potatoes last year by reading and watching videos on YouTube. I planted La Ratte, a fingerling that I will plant again, along with just three yukon gold plants, too close together in a raised bed. This year I’ll add a red potato to the mix. I’m excited to have more space to plant them, as Steve tilled up a large area for me just to use for potatoes and onions next to the raised beds. It’s maybe a 30 foot row, and I can plant two rows of poatoes and then stick a row of onions on the inner edges of those rows. I have to figure it out so I don’t crowd the onions, but compared to the raised beds, it seems like there is a lot of room out there.
The process for preparing the potatoes is pretty simple. First I cut them so that they’re in 2-3 inch pieces (about golf ball size) and so that their are a couple good sprouting eyes in each piece. Actually, this batch was just starting to sprout, and there weren’t that many good eyes. Since I had more than I needed, I just cut off the piece with the sprouting eye and threw the rest in the compost pile.
Some people say to leave them two days in the sun to let the cut side “callous.” I went a different route and pressed the cut side into a pan of sulfer powder which acts as a fungicide and serves basically the same purpose. (What can I say, I’m impatient.)
Outside, in a cold wind, I dug my trench, about 8 inches deep. What I discovered then was that my bed, which Steve plowed in the fall and tilled yesterday, is not so great. Although he mixed in topsoil and compost last fall, only a couple inches down I hit rocks and/or clay. Again, I bonded with my German neighbors. I figure most of the growth is up anyway, so just dug to the clay bottom and kept going. I was feeling a whole lot better off than the Buffalo Bird Woman who breaks land for her garden with a stick. Potatoes should grow in anything. And I’ll get another load of topsoil/compost mix to fill in the holes and mound up the hills as they grow.
Once the trench is dug, I laid in the seed potatoes, cut side down, and half-filled the trenches with dirt. Unfortunately, the dirt on the top of the pile was probably the most clay-like. All I know is that when I watered, it puddled and ran downhill. Sigh.
It felt quite good to get something in the ground today, to be out there in the wind and bright sun digging a trench. In this season of new life, to bury potatoes was much better than simply sprinkling lettuce seed on top of a raised bed or pressing peas down into the soil. It was real peasant work, and I’ll remember that when I go back for the first of the potatoes in three months.
(I’ll probably wait another week or two to plant the rest, though I might sneak in some of the fingerlings because I’d like to have them earlier in the summer. I’d like them to keep until winter, so don’t want to get ahead of myself. This is a time when it’s better if Easter comes late!)