Finally Got Something Planted in My Garden!!

Utah weather is very "diverse".  We have a saying, "If you don't like the weather, wait 5 minutes... it'll change".  I've literally seen all 4 seasons in one day this spring.

The unsettled weather has made it hard for me to get out and get some of my projects done--not to mention that my garage is so full of "stuff" that I can't pull even a rototiller into it to work out of the weather.

At any rate, we've had good weather the last couple weekends so I made good use of it. A couple from our church have a large plot of ground that they garden on, and they graciously allowed us to use part of it. I plowed up a section 45 feet wide by 55 feet long last fall. Our friend spread some bovine fertilizer on it and disked it for me this spring so the dirt was ready for planting. Here's a picture of me plowing last fall:

 

Our garden plot at home is fairly small, so I wanted to use this new plot for something I've never grown before--potatoes.  We also planned to put some squash there. When we plant squash in our garden at the house it is very rude to its neighbors--crowding it out and even running out into the lawn.

One year it even got up into the plum tree "hedge" between me and my neighbors. Another neighbor noticed a two foot long banana squash in the tree and asked me what kind of tree it was!!!

Anyway, I digress...

I read up a lot on how to plant potatoes (isn't the Internet wonderful??!!). The common thread of everything I read was that you wanted to plant them about 16 to 18 inches apart in hills with a furrow between the hills. After the plants come up, you need to put more dirt from the furrows up around the base of the plants since some of the potatoes tended to push out of the dirt and would go green from the sun.

Potatoes, along with tomatoes and eggplant, belong to the nightshade family.  The green color in a potato is poisonous and shouldn't be eaten--ditto with the stems, leaves and roots of all the above (the potato itself is a tuber and not a root). 

I could see that this would be a lot of work if done only with a hoe--making the initial furrows, then "hilling" them, and, when ready to harvest, digging them out with a shovel.

All of the articles I read used a furrowing attachment on a tractor. This ranged from the little garden tractors like Cub Cadets and John Deeres up to full-sized machines.  The furrower consists of a bar with two or more V-shaped blades set an equal distance apart from each other. It is pulled through the soil and cuts a small trench with the loosened soil cast up on either side of it. You place the seeds in the trench, then cover it over. Once the ground is furrowed, you simply put your seeds in at the recommended spacing then cover it over.

You can manually cover the seeds with a rake or hoe, or you can use the furrower bar with a couple of large disks angled towards each other.  The tractor straddles the hill and pulls the disks along it.  They cover the furrow back over, saving a lot of work.  The disks can also be adjusted to cast up soil around the base of the growing plants.  This keeps the potatoes from greening and also leaves a channel on either side for watering.

Here's what I came up with:

Here's another view:

 
It does a good job, too.  I furrowed our 45' x 55' garden plot and my wife and I planted 25 lbs of potatoes in under an hour.

We can dig up the potatoes we want for summertime cooking with a shovel. When it comes time for the harvest, though, I'll use a potato plow--basically a wide flared blade on a shank that goes into the ground under the potatoes and brings them up to the surface as it's pulled through the row.  Sure beats shoveling!!

Until later,

Smitty