Potatoes and onions are in!

For those in Kansas, you know that we had one of the most beautiful spring weekends we’ve seen in quite a while this past weekend.  We celebrated by spending all day Sunday at the farm working on the garden.  First though, here is a picture of the swales we created a couple of weeks ago:

3 swales on contour

The kids and I (Jeremy was at work) started the day by marking out 3 new beds to build.  These are 4’x20’ garden beds.  Then we started hauling dirt up from the dirt mountain to create the raised bed.  Have I mentioned how in love I am with this soil?  It’s wonderful, black, crumbly stuff – a gardener’s dream.  In the picture below, you can see where we’ve started the first of the 3 beds.

3 beds laid out, dirt started for first one.  You can see the kids loading the next wheel barrow in the background.

We planted almost all of these plus 70 seed potatoes!

Naturally, the batteries in the camera died after this picture, so I don’t have pictures of the rest of what we did…

Once the first bed was created, we planted about 80 cabbage and broccoli plants and covered them with an insect barrier.  We’ve found that it’s the only way to keep the cabbage worms off of the plants so that we get a reasonable harvest.  We still have more cabbage and cauliflower to plant, but that will have to wait until we can get more insect barrier.

The second bed was planted with about 400 onions.  We still have leeks to plant, but otherwise all the onions are in for this year.  The third bed got 40 hills of potatoes with the remainder of our onions planted on the borders.  We have another 30 hills of potatoes planted in the bed in front of the hoop house.

With a little luck and some good weather, we’ll be back at the farm this week to work on the fence and build another bed to hold the rest of the cabbage/cauliflower and the leeks.  We need to get the fence up as soon as possible because we noticed deer tracks all over the fresh soil around the garden.  We also had our neighbor’s chickens and ducks with us for most of the day and prior experience says that when tasty little things start shooting up from the ground, they will get eaten.  Must get the fence done.  Quickly.  On the upside, there is very little in life that is more entertaining than watching chickens be chickens and the intermittent serenade of quacks from the ducks was nice.

Speaking of neighbors, when we got in the truck to go back home it wouldn’t start.  Didn’t even try to turn over.  Since the camera whose batteries died was my phone, we were basically stranded with no way to call anyone.  The only thing left to do was go next door and see if they could help.  Our truly amazing neighbor, Don Spradling, didn’t even hesitate.  He brought his truck over to try jumping ours and when that didn’t work, he started checking other things.  He discovered that we had a bad starter relay.  Luckily there are 3 identical relays in the box, so he switched it for another one and the truck started right up.  Thank God for good neighbors!  Needless to say, a new relay was purchased and installed this morning.  If Don hadn’t been there and known enough to check and swap the relays, we would have had to call a tow truck and pay a mechanic to find out that we needed a $15 relay.  We really can’t say thank you enough.