Friday, March 9, 2018

Spring Planting

It's still rather early to plant summer yielding vegetables, but for cool season crops, like onions and potatoes, it is the perfect time.

Last week Tom planted onions.  He usually buys onion plants.  These come in bundles and can be obtained at many grocery stores, although he bought these from our local farm store.  He bought 5 bundles that included sweet onions and red onions.  He also bought 3 kinds of seed potatoes:  Kennebec, Yukon Gold and Red LaSota.  He spent an afternoon planting these.  They sure look tiny in the field, but they will grow big and round in our compost enhanced soil.


While I was down there taking pictures of the onions, I checked out the garlic we planted last fall.  In Oklahoma, you plant garlic in the fall and harvest it in June.  We mulch it with leaves for winter protection.  It's looking good.  


Tom had just finished planting potatoes when I was out there taking pictures.  Here he is mulching them with leaves.  Note the black trash bags full of leaves in the background.  These are some of the ones he rescued from the trash trucks in town last fall.  We use them for mulching the garden, as well as adding them to our compost piles.
 

Our chickens saw him out in the field and thought they would come see if they could help.  Actually, they were looking for bugs and whatever goodies they could find in the freshly tilled soil.
 

After they grew tired of that, they checked out the new compost pile and found that much more interesting.


The chicken in the foreground is scratching around in the remains of a pile of finished compost.  It was several feet tall before Tom spread most of it on the onion and potato patches.  There are still several buckets of compost here.  I plan to use that for some of my raised beds near the house.

We will not be doing as much gardening this year as we have in the past.  I am having some back problems and Tom is going to have to have eye surgery.  Getting older is NOT fun!  Never the less, I always see us having a small garden, if only to grow herbs and a few tomatoes.  

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