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mulberryknob

Too wet to plant potatoes today.

mulberryknob
11 years ago

My grandfather always said that the right day to plant potatoes was St Patrick's day. (I never thought to ask why, but the timing seems to be right.) But our garden is too wet today so hoping to get them in the garden later in the week. They've been cut, sulfured and drying for a week under newspapers in the greenhouse. The second crop of peas are almost ready to go in the ground as well. And in the garden, the lettuce, radishes and cress have broken through. Still waiting for the beets, spinach and carrots.

Comments (9)

  • Okiedawn OK Zone 7
    11 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    Dorothy, I have been able to plant about 40% of the seed potatoes in two raised beds, and I have one more raised bed where I can put another 20% of the crop. The remaining 40% will be waiting a while for the soil in the big garden to dry out some more, and with rain in the forecast for a couple of days this week, I am worried they may be waiting a while.

    I hope to have all my cool-season crops (transplants or seeds) in the ground by the end of the week. I was more or less on-time until it rained and I then had to sit and wait for the mud to dry up some.

    In the ground I have: some potatoes, all the onions, broccoli, lettuce, kale, swiss chard, sugar snap peas, mustard greens, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, cool-season herbs, cool-season flowers, and seeds of radishes, spinach, parsley and carrots. I still have some cabbage transplants to get into the ground, and the seeds of some more cool-season herbs and more carrot seeds I want to plant.

    Later in the week when it is freezing cold and rainy, I'll stay inside the house or in the greenhouse and start more flats of warm-season veggies, herbs and flowers to go with the ones I started last month.

    The ground is a little drier every day. I just hope it gets dry enough to finish planting before the next round of rain arrives. I know we need the rain and am happy it is in the forecast, but I sure would like to finish planting before it gets here.

    In Texas, my dad always said that potato planting time was Washington's Birthday. That worked for us there, but up here I like to wait until around St. Paddy's Day, though usually I plant 3 or 4 days before St. Patrick's Day because something always happens and I am forever running behind. If I plan to plant before St. Patrick's Day, I might actually get them done by St. Patrick's Day, weather allowing.

    Dawn

  • jacksonmom
    11 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    Can I just say that three years after my move from South Louisiana, I am still so baffled by the weather here that I don't have a planting schedule. I just wait for the Okiedawn posts to tell me when to plant. :D

  • Macmex
    11 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    I've gotten a little less than half of our potatoes in. Sunday, of course, was out of the question. It RAINED here! Such is our drainage that I might get more in today.

    This year I'm not purchasing any seed potatoes. I grew my own, mainly from Tatermater's TPS (True Potato Seed) last year. This year I'm actually going to get to trial some of these seedlings. Additionally, some folks sent me some strains of potato (tubers), late last year, which are supposed to be more heat tolerant than usual. So, I'm likely to be planting more potatoes than usual. I'm excited and hoping that at least some of these will produce seed as well.

    It's been an adventure learning to grow potatoes from seed. But I believe there's great potential in doing so. For instance, I started some seed on August 1 of last year. Just one of those seedlings produced enough mini tubers to plant over 30' of row this spring.

    George
    Tahlequah, OK

  • mulberryknob
    Original Author
    11 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    With only 1/4" of rain yesterday, the garden was dry enough to till this afternoon, so we planted the potatoes, the rest of the snap peas and some cabbage. That's clearing out the plant benches in the greenhouse so I can get some more flowers and warm season stuff started.

  • Okiedawn OK Zone 7
    11 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    Tim and I have been tearing apart the entire big garden and rebuilding it. Since he has been working six days a week, that means I am tearing apart the whole big garden and rebuilding it from scratch. What this means in practical terms, is that until I finish a new raised bed that I haven't even started rebuilding yet, I cannot plant the rest of the potatoes. I hope to get that bed rebuilt today (or at least started today and finished tomorrow). Then I hope to get the potatoes in the ground before Thursday's forecast rain. Unless the forecast has changed, we shouldn't get enough rain here to deter me from working in the big garden anyhow.

    Four raised beds are rebuilt and planted. There's still a lot left to do. Yesterday we bought new 1' x 6' lumber to reframe the 40' long raised bed where we grow asparagus. Obviously we didn't rototill it along with the rest of the garden, we just took down the old boards, dug out any bermuda grass and Johnson grass roots lurking under those boards, and put down the new boards. I hope next week we'll get three additional 40' long beds reframed, amended and ready for planting. This project has been somewhat delayed by between 3 and 4" of rain that has fallen in the last 4 or 5 weeks, but it is moving along better now that the soil has dried out more.

    As for why we are redoing all the beds--we're in our 15th spring here and I wanted to modify the layout where it doesn't follow the contour of the land so much and is more consistently linear, with most of the beds running east-west, which makes it easier to lay out the drip irrigation lines as opposed to earlier years when about half the garden ran north-south and the other half ran east-west. I also wanted to rototill the pathways. While the soil in the raised beds has improved a great deal, the pathway soil is less improved and holds too much water after heavy rainfall. By rototilling some organic matter into the pathways, I hope they'll begin to drain better. I'm excited about the changes to the big garden, but when you're doing a lot of dirt work, rain really interferes in your progress and on some of the non-rainy days that we could have been home working in the garden, we instead were at a wildfire than eventually reached about 3000 acres, so we fell further behind on the garden during that week.

    jacksonmom, If it is any consolation, it took me years to figure out when to plant things here. When we moved here, I was more of a planting-by-the-calendar gardener and I tried to plant things at about the same time here that I planted them in Fort Worth, which is only about 80 miles south of where I live and garden now in southern OK. That worked sometimes and at other times it did not work at all. It took me a while to get used to having colder nights later in spring here, and I learned to be more of an air temp/soil temp planter than a calender planter.

    There still are times when I feel like I plant something too early or too late for that particular year, but when your weather is a wild roller coaster ride in spring, that's just going to happen sometimes. Last weekend it hit 83 degrees here and even at night we were in the upper 50s or lower 60s. This coming weekend we will have highs in the 50s and lows in the 30s way down here in southern OK. Those sort of "mood swings" on the part of Mother Nature drive me up the wall, but I know I cannot do anything about them.

    Dorothy, Yay! Got you got that done. I noticed yesterday that my snap peas are starting to climb the fence. I'm hoping we have a long, cool spring so the cool-season crops have a chance to produce well this spring. The last two springs have been too hot too early. If we have a third consecutive year where it gets too hot before the sugar snap peas can produce well, I'll be so disappointed.

    And then there's this: For anyone here who remembers the cutworm and army worm issues last year that were widespread across Oklahoma, I am seeing a lot of their moths, particularly in the last two weeks. This is a little better than last year when those moths were showing up so early in January that I ignored them because I thought subsequent freezing weather would get them (apparently it didn't). I also have noticed while rebuilding the big garden that the pathways, in particular, have a lot of cutworms, corn earworms and army worms hiding under the board edging around the raised beds. I've been careful to gather them up and feed them to the chickens when I see them. Hopefully in rototilling all the soil after we lifted the boards, we destroyed any that were just at random places in the ground and not hiding under the boards.

    I've already seen cabbage white and checkered white moths, and had damage from their cats on overwintered cole family crops, but haven't seen any signs of damage yet on this winter/spring's planting of cabbage, broccoli and related family members.

    I hope to spend the cold, rainy days this weekend potting up warm season plants started from seed in flats. I have a lot of them in the greenhouse, and one flat (milk thistle, comfrey, wormwood and Cheyenne Spirit echinacea among other things) still on the light shelf indoors. After all of those are potted up, I'll start a lot more warm-season seeds.

    The list of seeds I have left to start in flats is long. With cooler, milder weather this spring, I will plant a bigger variety of herbs and flowers this spring after cutting back sharply the last two years because of the early onset of heat and drought.

  • mulberryknob
    Original Author
    11 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    I'm with you, Dawn. For the last two years I haven't had enough snap peas to suit me due to the early warmup. So I increased the planting by half--75 ft of trellis instead of 50--started some earlier--too early as it turned out, but they are still alive--and now have them all in the ground. So here's hoping. Haven't planted the broccoli yet, but planted some cabbage that I started in midJan and some more that I bought.

    I was at Lowe's in Tahlequah today and picked up a couple large tomato plants--an Early Girl and a Better Boy--and the cashier--being diplomatic, I'm sure--said, "My grandfather always said that it wasn't safe to plant tomatoes until after Easter." I said, " Your grandfather was wise, but I'm going to pot these up and hold them in the greenhouse till sometime in early April."

    Last year by this time, I not only had my tiny little four week old broccoli in the ground, but my only slightly older tomato plants--and they all did great since we warmed up so quickly, with no frost after the first week in March. This year is certainly different.

  • slowpoke_gardener
    11 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    I added 4' to the south garden yesterday. I still have to sift more compost to till in. I am hoping to grow Pole beans there. For some reason I just cant get pole beans to produce in the north garden. The soil test seems to be ok, I expect disease from wet soil may be one of my problems.

    My early potatoes froze, the others have not come up yet. I think trying to be early this year is actually going to cause me to be late on some things.

    I bought a 4 pack of early girls and brought them home and re-potted (because there were 7 plants in the 4 pack)

    Larry

  • Okiedawn OK Zone 7
    11 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    Dorothy,

    That was a nice, diplomatic cashier and I appreciate she was concerned you might not know it was too early for tomato plants in the ground. I run into that a lot when I buy the early ones for pots in January or February. I always just say they are going into pots in the greenhouse, though technically they are outdoors most days and inside only at night.

    I had a beautiful plan for everything I was going to get done yesterday, and then a crazed, rabid skunk came through in attack mode and dealing with it took up a huge chunk of the middle of my day.....and, afterwards, it was too stinky to work outdoors in the same pleasurable way I had worked early in the day. I eventually returned to the garden and worked for a couple of hours, but here I am this morning, more behind on finishing potato planting than I was before. I need to paint my spring gardening slogan on a board and post it in my garden. I'd choose the famous Roseann Roseannadanna saying "It's Always Something". I don't think I ever have a day where I'm not chasing a hawk away from the chickens, or a skunk away from the dogs or doing something else, generally wildife-related, that interferes in the planned day's garden activities.

    Larry, Do the pole beans grow but not produce beans? I have that issue in years when it gets too hot too early. I try to get them in the ground as early as possible so they can flower and set beans before the real heat sets in. Otherwise, they often drop blossoms all summer and don't make beans until fall. That's why I plant both bush and pole beans....the bush beans seem to produce earlier and heavily even in heat, though it eventually shuts them down. The pole beans seem slower and more finicky about the heat. I had the best pole bean year ever in 2004 because it rained a lot, which is rare in summer at our house, and the temperatures were mild and pleasant, considering it was summer. It seemed like all I did that summer was pick tomatoes and pole beans, I loved it. In recent years, the pole beans haven't produced very well until autumn.

    When I purchase transplants, I always look for the ones that have multiple plants in one container and then when I get home, i separate and repot them. I think of it as bonus gardening. I think that getting 7 plants for the price of 4 is a really good example of bonus gardening.

    Dawn

  • slowpoke_gardener
    11 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    Dawn, the green beans start out fine. They seem to stall after they set some fruit and then seem to get a ton of insects, then disease. After the disease I pull them up because I dont like looking at the sick plants. I can then plant the Yard Long beans in the same spot and they grow and produce like crazy, but I dont like them as well.

    I plant Roma bush beans which I love and do well. I would like to grow some pole beans because I have heard they produce more, and for a longer period.

    Larry

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