Bag Man Redux

As a mentioned in an earlier post we spent yesterday finishing the garden planting. We also added 16 more tires of spuds. Late Burbanks and Pontiacs. Jo-Ann had the brainiac idea of putting the smaller car tires on pallets so we could fill them up with planting soil at the pile and then just move them over to the garden where we placed them between the rows of truck tire. Works slick. Another local resource - used pallets. The local hardware store saves them up for me and then gives me a call when I have a trailor load. They are sure handy around the enterprise.

The spud-in-a-bag method is pretty simple. I used a small car or truck tire to hold the bag in place and then just filled it with soil after making sure I put a few holes in the bag for drainage.

After that we just planted the seed potatoes, eyes up and watered them. So far no spuds, but it's only been a day..
When the spud leaves start to poke through we will keep adding mulch to the bag to force the plant to grow vertically. Ideally the spuds should grow in the mulch.

We mixed a fairly sandy fast draining soil for use in the bags, and added a small handful of bone meal under each on. Our spuds are prone to scabs. This year we planted Russet Burbank and Red Pontiac. The pontiac is susceptable to scab, the Burbank isn't. Time will tell. We also rotated the crop from last year. We used Yukon Gold last year, great eating yellow fleshed spud but very susceptible to scab.

The garden is coming together. We will get the auto-magic watering working soon. today we are building a planter on the South side of the shop to put the strawberries in I got from my friend Ken.