From: Barbara Munkres – SATURDAY, APRIL 3:
Another beautiful, warm day. My lasting memory of the day is of children racing joyfully around Carla’s big backyard or enjoying the play equipment. The chickens were allowed to play outside their pen, also. They wandered quietly about, feeding and getting into mischief repeatedly in the barn where they scratched about in the straw…….. Carla explained that earlier in the week they had spread it all over the barn floor! So work was interrupted now and then to chase the chickens out of the barn.
Our chores included planting potatoes, which had arrived from a certified seed potato grower in Vermont: Russet Burbank, Katahdin, and Red Norland.
Here’s how it goes:
~prepare the soil by loosening it with hoes and rakes
~scatter blood meal with a hand “spreader”
~scratch the blood meal into the soil with hoes and rakes
~mark straight parallel lines 3 feet apart from one side of the plot to the other.
~dig a trench about 8 to 10 inches deep along each of the parallel lines.
~at the same time someone can be cutting the seed potatoes into pieces.
Each piece should have 2 eyes (dormant buds) from which the new plants will sprout. I learned that the potato pieces can go into
the soil about 1 foot apart. They don’t need to be oriented any special way. They know what to do (stems grow up, roots grow down!) In all we planted 4 rows of potatoes and marked their variety on stakes.
After the potatoes were planted several people continued to remove rocks and grass along the edge of the garden. It was a wonderful day in the garden.