Yesterday was another busy day in the garden. The greenhouse is almost complete, the final step being put off until today because of rain. All that is lacking is the second sheet of plastic that needs to be secured over top of the first piece. This task will not be too difficult, the only real work will be cutting and taping the plastic together in order to get enough length for the whole greenhouse. Once the plastic is in place the greenhouse will be 'officially operational' I say this because we did the first planting inside of it yesterday.
The first ever plant that ended up inside the greenhouse was a healthy looking cabbage plant, and we all wish him well. Along with the cabbage we also planted some oregano clones in pots (6), some onions we started from seed (12), a few chard, and seven total cabbage plants all under the protection of plastic.
Now, in my area of the world, I have heard that it is okay to plant potatoes on St. Patrick's day, March 17. Since I did not find this out until a few days ago, I cut up and prepared 6 lbs of potatoes that were ready to be planted yesterday. This first wave of potato planting included yukon gold and red norland varieties, 3 lbs of each. I was surprised to find how many eye seeds this actually came out to be and we had to use quite a bit of soil and space to get them all planted. Fortunately for us, we had a $30 donation, free wood, and free tires at our disposal, and out of this we made a small potato farm. Four tires were positioned behind the greenhouse, where it will still get plenty of sun, and underneath the tires we laid a layer of garden cloth to prevent attacks from below. Next we put a layer of organic compost, then 4 potato seeds positioned as such to maximize space, then filled it to the tire rim with organic topsoil. I like to use Mel's Mix or ProMix when I grow potatoes, but the $30 only went so far in soil attainment, thus requiring more amendments in the future. Once the tires were full with soil, we added a layer of mulch. Once the potatoes sprout out of this layer, a new tire will be added on top and more soil as necessary.
I want to be clear on one thing before I get into more details, this garden should be able to sustain itself strictly through donations and by the revenue it can potentially incur. The goal should be self-sustainability, and, if we are good gardeners and liaisons to the community, I believe this is 100% possible. It has already proven effective in that we have purchased no wood, have had monetary donations, and we can scrap tires and aluminum for use in our operation. Mulch and compost should be free forever, since there is a shredded wood pile back a bit further on the property.
Now, back to the potatoes; The rest of the potato seeds were planted in a 4x4 square foot garden bed in front of the greenhouse. I believe the bed is 4-6 inches deep but another gardener we have on the project has already built two more 4x4 frames that can be stacked on top of this one as the potatoes outgrow the first box. Even after four tires and a 4x4 frame, there were still about 16 potato seeds left. So, as night fell, we took these seeds back to our own house on the lake for planting. We have a few large bio growing bags that we had used for potatoes last year and we decided to use them for these potatoes this year. We washed the bags in the lake as best we could, and started with Mel's Mix in the bottoms of the bags. We planted four seeds in each of these bags and set them out on the dock.
In a nutshell, that was the day's events, and now it is back out there for more. The sun is shining and it looks to be a beautiful day.
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