Potato Planting

It started raining just as I was leaving for work this morning, a lovely gentle spring rain.  During my commute in, all I could think about was all that lovely water going to waste.  I still haven't gotten with my HOA to see if they will allow us to put a rain barrel in the front yard, my bad.  Home Depot has one with a stone-like finish (sandy exterior in both texture and color) which I think looks fine, but we'll see what the HOA says.

I got home late, but made time to get the potatoes in.

The left end of the "front" (curb-side) bed is where the potatoes will be going in.  There will be 4 plants, each allocated 1 square foot.  Potatoes need extra-deep dirt, and trust me, if you dig down at all around here you run into hard Virginia red clay pretty quickly.  Square Foot Gardening's answer to potatoes and other hilled and/or deep-reaching veggies is to use a taller raised bed.  So hubby built me two boxes with 2 x 6 lumber.  (The second box, sized for the back bed, will be for carrots.)

Here is the potato box in a test fit.  If you look closely, you'll see that the rear end of the box is sitting on dirt, not the cross-wise timber, which is what I'd wanted.  Hubby said, yes, but now it's level.  Can't argue with that.

Here we are with all the newly amended soil scraped out of the way and then Garden-Clawed down as far as I could, dumping the red clay on top of the amended stuff.  Just about broke my trowel, too; you can see the collar holding the tang onto the handle has come loose.  Also note the pile of delusional rocks in the upper-left corner.  These are lumps of clay which think they are rocks, that is until you hit them hard enough with a very sharp object, whereupon they break into flakes, or shatter.  Generally, though, it's much easier just to pry them out instead and leave them in their delusional state.  The Kennebec seed potatoes are foreground left, 15 oz. worth altogether.

After planting & covering those with a few inches of soil, I transferred the rest of that mountain of dirt to a big 5-gallon bucket for back filling in days/weeks to come, cleaned up and called it a day.  Oh, my arms!