Planting Potatoes and Onions

Planting Potatoes and Onions

Yesterday, February 28th, I had just finished digging 3 trenches for potatoes and prepared one bed for onions when a blustery storm chased me into the house. It rained hard, it rained sideways, and it rained hail.

Today, March 1st, I went outside to check the planting beds and to my surprise, they were not wet. I planted the potatoes and the onions.

According to instructions, I planted the seed potatoes, which I had cut a few days ago, 18 inches apart and covered them with soil. I didn't measure the soil depth, but it was probably around 3 inches or less.

I pushed the onions, spaced 6 inches apart, into the ground. The last two dozen or more onions are closer than 6 inches because I was running out of space.

I added leaf mold to the garden and tilled the garden last November and that made this job easy compared to what it might have been. The soil could have been wet, compacted, and heavy, but it was not.

Last year at my request, my husband dumped a large pile of mulched leaves in the middle of the garden. He was glad to do it because it saved him time. It will save me time too because I won't have to haul mulch from the woods. A caveat is that I usually use leaves from the year before last. Today I used some of the leaves to mulch parts of the garden, the path, the space between the potatoes, and a thin layer over the onion bed. I'll see how that works out later.