If at First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again.

With the ground having warmed up, its time to plant the spuds. We purchase our seed potatoes from Peaceful Valley Farm and Garden Supply. This is a great outfit, and everything they sell is certified organic.
The seed potatoes lying on the bags are the ones we purchased.

The seed potatoes at the bottom of the photo are potatoes that we recognized had eyes.
After keeping these in storage for several months the eyes have sprouted, and are also ready to be planted.

We purchased five different kinds of potatoes, 1 lb of each.

When planting, bury the top of the spud about 4 in. under the ground, with the new growth pointed up.
For potatoes larger than 2 in., you can cut the potato into pieces, making sure each piece has at least two eyes.

The cut side of the potato should be dipped in a wood ash.
This will callous the cut end and seal it from moisture.
Callousing is very important when planting in cold or damp soil

Once the stalks of green emerge from the soil, and have reached a height of 4 to 5 inches, you must start to create a mound around the new growth. When mounding, only leave 1-2 in. of the greenery exposed to sunlight.
Doing this will protect the new roots from sunlight.

This mounding process may have to be repeated again in several weeks.
After planting, cover with a good layer of hay, this will help the soil retain moisture during the hot summer days.

This potato is one that we kept from a bag we had purchased.
This one we will cut into a few pieces and have plenty of eyes in each piece.

Commercially grown potatoes are more than a little scary.
Here is some information from the USDA’s Pesticide Data Program.
- 35 different pesticides have been found on conventional potatoes.
- 6 of which are probably carcinogens
- 12 are suspected of playing havoc with your hormones, the term the USDA uses is disruptors
- 7 are neurotoxins
- 6 are developmental or reproductive toxins
Like I said, conventionally grown spuds are more than a little scary, they are down right lethal.

With last year's potato crop not being what we expected, some changes were necessary.
Despite rota-tilling the bed 3 time, the soil was still to compact and lumpy.

We decided that we would put in the time, and build another rock wall.
Doing this would enable us to fill the bed with fresh, high quality, aerobic compost, and soil.

We were looking to build the new rock walls another foot higher to create an entirely new mound of soil for the spuds to grow in.

With the walls finished it was time to get busy.

We mixed peat-moss, bags of organic soil, and more organic matter from our compost pile that had been decaying for almost a year now.

After adding the soil, I felt like we had made the necessary changes to the potato bed, and had a chance to grow a bumper crop of spuds this year.

With the potato seeds planted, and the hay laid down, only time will tell if our goal of 200 lbs of spuds will come to fruition.

Hope you enjoyed! thebigsweed.