Potato time

We decided it was time to try planting the potato eyes in the straw bales. This one was prepped by watering it and wrapping it in plastic.
Paula plants the same variety in the unwrapped bale that received water and fertilizer.
A little baby yarrow! Not sure if this is a transplant from home or from seed, but glad to see it.
Maximilian sunflowers are still coming up from the area we dug up.
We pulled them up and put them along the back fence.
While digging a hole to plant a little elderberry shoot, I broke open an underground fungus ball. Neat!

Straw bale gardening

I read a book about straw bale gardening. The bale requires a bit of composting first. So one is wrapped in plastic to accelerate. Once it’s happy we’ll move to other bale. Next month seed potatoes will be sold at feed store and we can put them in. Thanks to friends of blog for donating their leftover fall decoration bales to this experiment.

Opening the box

No time to plant until after work, but my live plants arrived this morning!! Very clever packaging. Source was Mountain Valley Growers, in California, a new place for me.

Rainbow garden beds progress

Replanted coreopsis looking rather worse for the wear but still has some leaves, so I hope for its recovery.
Mealy blue sage for blue. Seedlings transplanted to pots from near the house ones, and now grown big enough for the ground.
Culinary sage for a light purple.
Waiting on other colors but you can see it’s starting to take shape! The peach tree will be part of the orange section. The butterfly weed seeds will probably take a while to get going, so I am also waiting on some marigold seeds for fast orange.

Harvesting onions and hilling potatoes

6 kg of yellow granex onions.
4.5 kg white granex onions.
Briar smiles over the bounty. The Chef is going to chop and dehydrate the stems/leaves for green onions. About 1.6 kg of green onion from both varieties.
Put the last tub of city compost on the potatoes to “hill” them so they put out more roots. All the bags are fully opened up now.
Zucchini begins.

Trimming the claws

I trimmed off several branches from both blackberry plants that had leaves with this mystery curl. It looks a lot like online pictures of leaf curl virus damage. It was not a leaf rolling insect, those I leave alone and consider just part of the ecosystem. The raspberry leaf curl virus can kill a whole plant apparently so I wanted to be safe.