My Spring into Taters!

I’m not sure if anyone else got outside into a garden on March the 6th, but I did. The temperatures in southern Missouri got up to the mid sixties and that was enough to motivate me to amble into the back yard and begin what has become a ritual every year. Getting the raised beds ready for another season of great veggies.

Now as a gardener, my spatial aspirations are really quite small. I have just three little raised beds that are about four feet by eight feet in size. Last season, however, this sixty four square feet of growing space produced about fifty pounds of edible produce. (I know that's true because I actually weighed every bit and have the results available in a data file should anyone be interested).

On this date, I worked the soil in each bed to loosen it up a bit and then went ahead and planted some leaf lettuce seed I had left over from last year. I also planted a bit of radish seed as a marker and about 6 broccoli seed for the hell of it. I’ve never had much luck growing broccoli from seed. Even when I have gone to transplant, I’ve had poor luck. I think the climate is just not quite right here in southwest Missouri for them. They also take up quite a bit of room and when space is at a premium that can be a problem.

My biggest foray, this season, will be the great potato growing experiment! You see, I have never planted potatoes before and am a little nervous about making mistakes. My usual thing is to make every mistake possible and then some day I'll be an expert...at making mistakes! But, that's never deterred me. So, at the local grocery store, I managed to violate a potato growing principle right off the bat. I purchased ‘non-certified’ seed potatoes that will, in all likelihood, rot or become diseased the first chance they get. Well, maybe not. Anyways, they certainly look the proper part. They've got little shoots growing here and there. They're also pretty dirty.. The crate they were in said they were Kennebec seed potatoes. I’ll assume this is a good potato to grow in Missouri. When I got the checkout counter the young girl asked me if that was the best I could do. I just smiled and told here that last potato crop had evidently failed. I still don't know who was pulling whose leg. You know it’s funny how you can be really old and yet totally naive or young and very world wise.I tend to fall in to the former rather than the latter.

So, tomorrow is Sunday and the weather is supposed to hold tight for one more day before its forecast to get wet for much of the rest of the week. I’ll use this time to finish up with surface preparation and then when it get rainy outside, I plan to make a trip to a local garden center to stock up on seed and additional soil.

Updates to come!