Well a lovely, almost summers day and still March, will be Easter soon.The Rhubarb has also noticed the warm summery weather and has sprouted many new leaves, I'm sure it will be waist high in no time now, the weather report has said it will be dry for at least 5 days, a bit of rain would be nice but did get an over night downpour on Friday & Saturday.
Did I mention Easter, the traditional time to plant the 1st early Potatoes.Well the 'Rocket' spuds have been chitting for a few weeks now and the soil had been Cultivated & Manured, so was time to put them in.
My method:
Put a straight line across the soil, 12" from the edge.
dig a trench about 4-6" deep, put a few handfuls of Chicken manure pellets on the soil dug out.
Place the 'chitted' spuds 12" apart along the bottom of the trench then using a rake carefully pull the soil back over them, making a small mound of soil. Then make another trench, 24" away from the 1st, to give the spuds room to grow.
Then using the rake vertically, carefully flatten the top of the soil mound, this aids moisture retention when it rains, the water will not run off as with a peaked mound, but will soak down to the spuds underneath.Mark each row with a label, with planting date, so you can check how long they have been growing/maturing etc.
I managed to plant 44 spuds, 11 to each row. Last year I planted 'Rocket' and they only took 2 months to grow/mature, Rocket by name, Rocket by nature.
So yet another busy afternoons work, did some more weeding and made some more space for another row of the Sarpo Mira main crop Potatoes, so can now plant 10 more to make 30 in total.The Chickens came down with us today again, but as tomorrow is the 1st anniversary of their life with us since being released from Battery Farm, I will be doing a special Blog tomorrow just for them & will show a picture taken on day 1, so you can see their improvement.
Thanks for reading/returning, Ian.
Check back tomorrow night.
Glad to hear you are getting some warmer weather. Apart from today we've had fog, mist and temperatures around 3 deg C all week until today, despite the T.V. weather forecasters trying to tell us different?
ReplyDeleteGood advice in your post on planting potatoes. I had a part bag of old unusable spuds from last year languishing in my garage, which over chitted in the bag a while ago. They were main crop (can't remember the type), so it was either plant them or bin them. Well I planted 3 and a half 15ft rows and they are already seeing daylight.