St. Patty's Potatoes
Maybe it is just old Appalachian folklore, but I believe it. In order to have a good crop of potatoes, the seed has to be planted on Saint Patrick's Day. With that thought in mind, Kevin and I began the task of getting our three thousand square foot garden ready to plant taters.
The land has set fallow for the last year, so we weren't sure what we would find as Kevin fired up the old Troy-bilt tiller. We were both surprised and thrilled when we saw what great soil that tiller was turning over. Right down the center of the garden space, Kevin turned over a four foot bed for my St. Paddy's potatoes.
The ground was beautiful. That night we cut up 10 pounds of seed potatoes and ended up with about 200 eye starts. We spread those out on newspaper overnight to let them cure out.
St. Patrick's Day started out with a very cool wind, but that didn't dampen out spirits. We added sand to the potato bed and Kevin went over it a time or two again to blend everything together. After cutting in the furrows, we ended up with three hundred foot rows.
As Kevin went to work on the raised beds, I began planting the seed eyes. Each row held around seventy starts, spaced approximately 15" apart. That was the easy part. Now they all had to be covered.
Kevin showed me that using the back of a garden rake was much easier than crawling down those rows doing the covering by hand. That doesn't mean that, for me, it wasn't hard work. It was...and my back and arms discovered muscles they didn't know were there
By this time, Kevin had one of the twenty foot raised beds prepped and I planted the few remaining seed eyes in two rows. With that job behind us, it was time for lunch.
After lunch, it was back to the garden. We transplanted garlic first. That took the full portion of another bed. Next, we did onion and leeks. The fourth bed, we used for peas and edible pea pods. Somewhere in the mix add in a few radishes and some boc choi and our vegetable garden day was done.
Now all that was left was to dig up and replant the daffodils in the front yard. At the end of the day, all was done, we were tired, hoping the weatherman was right, and rain was coming.
