Posted in Gardening
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Planting season has gotten underway big time. We recently planted close to 200 Guardian strawberry plants. I will give you Mark's step by step instructions on those. We also planted several rows of white potatoes. Now Mark is tilling to plant the rest of the garden. He hopes to get some of the tomatoes in today then plant the rest of the warm weather things Monday night and Tuesday when he is off. Potatoes: The Kennebec potatoes we planted in hills. I know some people don't spend too long planting their potatoes but Mark wants things done right ( read "his way"~ smile) After tilling, he digs a trench with a hoe pulling the dirt to one side. Then he ( or his slave labor) sprinkles a bone meal/blood meal fertilizer in the trench. Next the potatoes are placed in the holes about a foot a part. Last the dirt is hilled back up over the potato trench. The rows are about 3 ft apart. When the potatoes start to come up, more dirt will be hilled up around them. Now for the strawberries: Mark tills the area. Bone meal/blood meal fertilizer is sprinkled in before the last run of the tiller. After tilling, we dig a small hole with our hands. In the middle of the holes we make a little mound of dirt.  We carefully put the strawberry plant on top of the mound and spread out the roots, making sure the plant will be buried up about halfway on the stiff part where the "crown" is. The plants are about a foot apart with rows 3 ft apart.  To cut down on weeding-since our slave labor crew is getting smaller every year-we put down landscaping fabric around the plants.  Hay mulch will be also put on top of this. It is good to do a thorough job on this since the plants will be in the ground several years and keeping weeds out is important. Around the outside of the strawberries we put down black plastic then put our fence up. We use the landscaping fabric close to the plants because it will allow water through, unlike the black plastic. And the tomatoes: We planted Early Girl, Celebrity, Better Boy, Amish Paste, Brandywine , and Mortgage Lifters. The Celebrities have consistently done well for us and are good for our planting zone. They seem to be pretty disease resistant. Mark is equally meticulous about planting the tomatoes. First he tills, then we make holes with a hoe about 1 foot apart.  In the hole we put old, dry chicken manure.  We sprinkle a little dirt over the chicken manure and place the plant in the hole. Next we liberally water the plant and put more dirt around the plant up to the first big leaves.  Mark likes to cover about half the plant even if the first leaves are covered with dirt. The tomato rows are around 4 feet apart.  All this will be mulched heavily with hay. The less weeding we have to do the better. Since we are doing things organically we won't be spraying any weed killer on our garden. Mark doesn't really stake the tomatoes. Along each side of the row of tomatoes at about 10 ft intervals he puts T-posts. Then , as the tomatoes grow, he tightly stretches 3 levels of nylon twine down each row of T-post . This works well for large quantities of tomatoes. We planted about 120 plants. (In Georgia one time we planted around 700 tomato plants ! Glad we didn't have to do that tonight.)I hope this isn't all too detailed. I just figure if you haven't done this before it might help. |
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Posted by Anonymous
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