Growing the good stuff in Athens, GA since 2006

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Hilling Potatoes & Recipes Finally Online

Summer is on the way. This week, we seeded corn and beans. Already! I know it's mid-April, and we always seed corn in mid-April, but wow, is it really that time already? I guess so. Spring Treat corn and Blue Coco pole beans are in the ground. Corn, beans, squash -- all three sisters are present on-farm now. Hard to believe.

In the greenhouse, we seeded more tomatoes, basil, cukes, and summer squash. In the field, we transplanted basil, and we've got another round of summer squash ready to go in.

Also in the field, I finally realized a dream I've had for over two years now of hilling potatoes. I love potatoes. Love love them. Any form of potato is an extremely edible one for me, and I tend to savor them on a weekly basis. With that in mind, I've been pushing for us to grow more potatoes and we have -- up from one row to two, from two to three, and our space is kinda maxed out at three. So now what? We go vertical. I've heard of hilling potatoes being a method that helps increase the amount you can get from a single planting, and last year, I found out first-hand that it will probably make digging them easier, so this year we schemed and developed a new planting method. After tilling their proposed planting place, we ran the subsoiler (a big steel shank about 3 feet long) down the row to create a deep furrow. Then we hoed out the sides to make a ditch and planted those spuds deep. For a while, I worried that we may have planted them too deep, but a couple of weeks ago they began sticking their leaves up out of the ground and yesterday we had some over a foot tall! So I decided to begin phase one of hilling. I took a traditional hoe and hoed the sides of the ditch in to pull the dirt up around the plants and lo and behold my dream is a reality -- hilled potatoes! And this is only round one. Round two is when they grow another foot high and I take the tractor through with the single disc implement and hill them some more. Pounds of potatoes, here I come!

And another victory this week is in relation to my recipes project. I finally got my recipes files online! So now, you can go to our website, go to the recipes page, and just click on a vegetable and it'll bring up a whole list of recipes related to it! Finally. User-friendly. Print-able. Google docs have made this all possible, that and my friend Sarah Sapinski's technical assistance. God bless them both.

Ahhhh. To see a dream become reality, to see a plan fall so neatly into place as you hoped it would, is indeed a gift that I am grateful for. And one that farming seems to offer in abundance.

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