Plant those taters & the tomatoes are dead Jim!

The first of the year here and it's time to plant your potatoes. So I double dug my bed and planted my taters. I tried saving some of my potatoes from last year in the crisper of my fridge to plant this year but, they turned into a big pile of mush. So I went to the store and bought sacks of Red, Yukon, and Ruby Crescent potatoes. When you buy your potatoes it's best to buy seed potatoes or organic. These taters aren't sprayed with the chemical that inhibits sprouting. All regular grocery store potatoes are sprayed to keep them from sprouting on the shelf. Grocery store potatoes also supposedly carry more disease and fungus's. Where seed potatoes are really clean and have no chemicals sprayed on them. This year I decided to go with what I found at the grocery store (mainly because after I dug the bed I opened up my fridge and found that my seed potatoes I saved from last year turned into mush, and I didn't feel like looking for seed potatoes). I hope I don't have to eat crow on this! The Red Crescent taters were at least organic, and I rinsed the rest of the potatoes off to try and get them as clean as possible. I will say this, I've grown potatoes here before, and the red  taters always produce a bumper crop while the rest are always so so. That's why I always plant half the bed with reds and try other potatoes in the other half.

The bed before I knocked it down, it's my old tomatillo/ pepper patch.

Here's the bed, I double dug it and added a layer of homemade compost. 

Tater from left to right Ruby Crescent Fingerlings, todays chicken eggs, Red, and Yukon Potatoes.

Here's the bed all planted I only bury the potatoes a couple inches deep and then add a deep layer of alfalfa on top, harvest when tops die back usually in May, Stay tuned.

One of my big time goals is to have tomatoes all year long. I haven't even come close in summer but I've come close in winter, last year I had one survive all winter long and had a bumper crop in the spring. This winter has been much colder and the frost has already killed my tomatoes. It's pretty disappointing since some of my plants were 6 feet tall at one point. Next year I'm going build cold frames, but that's a different post. This coming Friday we're forecast to have a hard freeze so with great sorrow, I went and picked all my green tomatoes today. You can place  these green tomatoes in a window sill and they'll ripen in a few weeks, but they just don't taste as good. It's better than letting the hard freeze get them.

Dead Jim!

Maybe next year.