Vertical Potato Growing

Tuesday, July 13, 2010 at 6:13PM

Grow Potatoes Veritcally

This one comes courtesy of our friend Mark Jones, at Sharondale Farms in Cismont, Virginia.  Instead of spending all that time and sweat mounding your potatoes with dirt, do it with straw.  Start them out with small mounds of dirt and when they begin to grow, use straw to mound them up.  Wet the straw as you mound and push it down to be compact.  Keep adding as the potatoes grow and add a potato fence to keep the straw in.  We just pushed in pieces of old wood as our potato fence.  Once the plants die down, then you just move the straw aside and you'll have a ton of potatoes to harvest (well, probably not a full ton if you're just using a garden bed). Then you'll have all that straw aged and rotted a bit to use as mulch or in your compost.   If you have a tip for us, leave it in our guestbook and we'll share the wealth.

Farm Art

 It's not all about the work.  One of the pleasures of having a farm is enjoying the aesthetic qualities of it.  Most farms, if they've been around awhile, have old pieces of metal, fencing and equipment sitting around collecting rust. Sometimes they're buried in the soil and eventually work their way up tot the top; or you run into them with your tiller.  We collect all of them and later turn them intoFARM ART.  Farm art can be as simple as nailing old pieces of metal, hub caps or license plates to the side of your barn.  Pictured are a couple of other ideas - wind old barbed wire  into a wreath or around something else.  The one pictured left is finished off with poison ivy vine.  Or make an iron mobile.  This one uses old wheels, a tiller blade, an old chain and hook and some other unidentifiable metal pieces.  Instead of filling up the landfill, recycle your junk into FARM ART.  

Cat Patrol

Cat Patrol - March 2011

This time of year, we start thinking about pests.  We let our chickens run free this Winter in the garden.  They tilled the soil and ate countless overwintering bugs.  But it's the bigger pests we're now concerned about.  The mice, moles and voles that eat the roots of your plants before they can even get established.  What's the only tried-and-true form of control for these pests?  Why cats, of course (and sometimes dogs).  A cat is the only environmentally, and most would agree humane, way to control rodents.  There's one waiting for you right now at the ASPCA.  Go get it and make it live outside (don't forget to provide it with some shelter and food, of course).