So! On of the first things that I became very curious about while poking around in my favorite gardening group is POTATOES! I want to grow them! So I asked about them and looked around... Below is what I have found so far.
A Friends Blogging on Planting Potatoes
-The Sassy Butterfly
Here are some links from another friend... Jennifer Lawrence
Gardening Jones
Gardening Jones
This is most of what LadyFern posted telling me about potatoes...
"Now,
on to what i know of planting taters from 'eyes' that's easy! they'll
even do it on their own right in the produce bag if you happen to leave
them in a cool darkish corner of your kitchen floor. what i find easiest
though is to grab a few potatoes and stand them on end, side by side in
a recycled egg carton. when you stand them up this way, the eyes pop up
and grow straight up, making your job of cutting them a bit easier.
leave them in a semi lit area of a warm kitchen for a few days and watch
the little eyes become green sprouts. when you can see that mister
tater really is alive and there are several little sprouts, you take
your kitchen knife and cut the tater into chunks with at least one eye
on each piece. gently lay your chunks out on a piece of cardboard for a
couple of days. the places you cut will turn ugly and form a type of
scab. once this firms up, you dig your soil, add compost, manure, dried
leaves and dig it in nice and deep. make yourself a nice mounded hill
and plant a couple of your chunks, sprout side up in each hill, water
and wait.
taters are heavy feeders, they need abundant
sunshine, lots of water and appreciate a great deal of fertilizer
throughout their growing season. you can begin harvesting when the
plants begin to look 'piddly' and yes, that is a gardening term. LOL
your plants will stop blooming, lose leaves and change color, dying
back all the way to the ground in time. there are beautiful, delicious
taters under those mounds by this time and you can even leave some to
get a touch of frost if you like, harvesting them from the garden bed as
you need them. in some cases they will even return the following year
if you have good drainage and they don't rot away in the soil.
taters still feel 'magical' to me. they are one of my most favored
plants to grow. because they are such heavy feeders, its a good idea not
to plant them in the same place year after year, switch things around
and rotate your crops to keep your soil healthy year after year. my
favorite organic fertilizer is a mixture of comfrey leaves, steer manure
and fish emulsion. smells positively rotten but most of the beauties of
my garden benefit from it. happy gardening!" -LadyFern
" you grow them in full sun, they need warm earth around them to produce and i've always covered sprouts and all. Onlyone Hillbilly Gardener, would you like to chime in here? I would suppose you could leave a bit of the tip of sprout sticking
out of the ground? the idea though is to continue hilling up soil
around them as they grow, as they grow new roots along the joints of the
stem and if you cover these, you get more taters..... thats what I do but as they
get taller, 6 inches or so you lump the soil right back over them and
they continue to pop up through the soil" -LadyFern
This was one of the responses
"
As the potatoes grow, you
NEVER cover the entire plant. Basically, every time the plant gets 6-8
inches tall, you cover all but the top 4-6 sets of leaves. What is
buried in the ground will develop roots and the top of the
plant continues to produce food for the plant. It will continually try
to grow taller as it has an inherent need to have a certain amount of
top growth in order to produce the u=underground tubers.
My big
problem with using trash cans is the fact that they shade the early
plant too much and they stretch and elongate far too much trying to
reach the sun. The plant remains weak until it can gain enough height to
get the sun it needs. I need to do another trash bag potato project
that we used to use in the 70's to show you an alternative that works
much better and is much cheaper and easier to use." -OnlyOne Hillbilly Gardener
You won't be able to read the below links on FaceBook unless you friend OnlyOne Hillbilly Gardener on FaceBook which I recommend anyone interested in gardening do pronto because he has some of the best info I have seen! So wise! <3
Here is an excerpt from our gardening group on planting by the moon.
Many
have asked me if planting by the moon signs really work. Let me tell
you of the last experiment with planting by the moon signs I was
involved with. It involved 100 pounds of "White Cobbler" seed potatoes.
We cut the potatoes up into their respective eyes and let them dry for a
couple of days. We then divided the potatoes out into 2 different lots
of equal weight. The first lot, we planted that day because we had time.
The second lot we planted a couple of days later when the moon was
favorable. Both lots were planted side-by-side in the same area of
ground.
Throughout the year, we grew and cultivated them the
same way. The potatoes planted by the moon started blooming a full week
earlier than the ones planted earlier, despite having been planted later
than the first lot. That fall, after
waiting until all of the potatoes were ready, we harvested all of the
potatoes at the same time. The potatoes planted when we had time yielded
763 pounds of potatoes and a lot of smaller potatoes. The potatoes
planted by the correct moon sign yrilded 1,015 pounds of potatoes and
few small potatoes.
We always did average more than 12-15
pounds of potatoes per plant when we grew them before and many of the
plants topped well over 20 pounds of potatoes per plant. That is the
power of planting by the right moon sign. Most gardeners today never see
the full potential of potato yields partly because they do not plant by
the correct moon sign, they do not hill properly or deep enough and
they are stengy with both their water and their fertilizer. Potatoes are
extremely heavy feeders and require a lot of water in order to produce
to their fullest.
The Fallowing recipes are also from OnlyOne Hillbilly Gardener also =]
They went up on the gardening group around St. Patty's day.
This recipe sounded really yummy.
Irish Beef Stew
Yield: 6 to 8 servings
• 2 pounds lean beef stew or chuck, in 2-inch chunks
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon pepper
• flour for dredging
• 2 tablespoons bacon drippings or vegetable oil
• 2 large yellow onions, chopped
• 1 garlic clove, finely minced (optional)
• 6 to 8 medium carrots, scraped and sliced
• 2 to 3 large potatoes, peeled and cut into cubes
• 2 to 3 turnips, peeled and cut into cubes (optional)
• 1 cup Guiness stout
• 1 cup beef broth
Season beef with salt and pepper; toss beef chunks in flour until well coated.
Heat drippings or oil in Dutch oven and brown beef over medium-high
heat in two batches. When all are browned, remove beef from pan and add
onions and garlic. Cook over medium heat until onions are translucent.
Return beef to pot and add carrots, potatoes, turnips, stout, and
broth. Bring to a boil and reduce heat to a simmer. Cover and cook for 2
hours or until beef is tender.
Another recipe I so want to try!
St. Patty's day will be here soon and you do not need to be Irish to enjoy this "larrapin" dish. I love it - St. Patty's or no.
Corned Beef and Cabbage
Ingredients:
4 lb. corned beef
1 med cabbage, cut into wedges
4 medium carrots, cut in large pieces
3 medium onions, quartered
3 stalks celery, thickly sliced
1 1/2 cups white wine
3 medium Potatoes, cubed
5 cloves
1 bay leaf
Directions:
Rinse the meat thoroughly under cold running water. Place in a
crock-pot. Sprinkle with spice packet. Put the vegetables in the
crock-pot with the wine, bay leaf, and cloves. Cover and cook on the low
setting for eight hours. Serves 10
This is all I have for now on tatters... I may add to this! Hope it helps someone else too! <3
No comments:
Post a Comment