Posted on 03/26/2022 7:19:11 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
Opinions vary - some here might be very organized in their crop rotations. The key is spacing, fertilizing well and soil condition, IMHO. Your mileage may vary! :)
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Indeed yes! I would also add that it is a good idea to get your soils tested on a yearly basis for ph and fertility. This way you will know what amendments to add, and which are not needed.
Beautiful! Sadly, we are zone 5 here, and looking at 2 inches of snow and 19 degree weather. But spring will arrive at some point. I hope.
I grow potatoes, which are in the same family as tomato, in the same spot every year but I have fairly acid soil with a pH of 5-5.5 which prevents scab. Never had a problem with blight either. Not a recommended practice though.
Where does the blight come from? Are potato farmers' fields full of blight? Seems like they wouldn't last very long as potato farmers if that were the case.
Blight or Late blight - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytophthora_infestans
Early Blight - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternaria_solani
Both need moist environments and the former, water-saturated or nearly saturated environments and the latter, humidity and wet leaves.
Air conditioned grocery stores and homes are dry so I can't see those places being loaded with blight spores.
There seems to be a 50/50 split in people that say store bought potatoes are fine to plant and people saying you shouldn't plant them. Some people say they are sprayed with something to keep them from sprouting but all the ones I've bought will sprout.
I've always bought seed potatoes from the grocery store. Since grocery stores are a place you can purchase seed potatoes, that kind of rules out it being a source for blight. My little grocery store keeps the seed potatoes 10 foot away from the eating potatoes. Seems like they'd come in the same trucks too because I doubt there are special trucks delivering seed potatoes out here in the boonies.
Reading the two wiki pages, it seems like the spores have a hard time living when conditions aren't ideal, mostly in the wet soil or on the wet foliage or tubers in the soil or culls piled up on the soil. The spores can travel with the wind for a time. Dry and/or warm conditions will kill them, however one of them can stay with the tuber and make it rot later. Which all brings me back to potato farmers' fields being loaded with blight in which case, they'd not be farmers for very long.
Reading up on them makes me think about something else. They say to dig taters when the soil is dry but one year I pulled plants up taters and all while the soil was moist and that was a lot easier than digging heavy, dry soil. Maybe they say to dig dry to prevent you from bringing blight into your root cellar which is cool and moist, ideal conditions for blight to survive.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/4048051/posts?page=119#119
Later the potatoes have soil ridged over the rows ("hilled") to prevent greening and control weeds in the row.
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The plastic mulch also prevents weeds and eliminates the need to hill and cultivate.
https://extension.psu.edu/potato-production
So it's mostly about covering any tubers that may end up sticking out of the soil to prevent greening and also helps with weeds. Using plastic mulch does the same as hilling. I'm thinking I need some plastic mulch because I decided to feed hay to the goats down in my bigger garden area where I grow potatoes. I did it for two reasons.
1) my little bitty tractor can't lift a round bale of hay but can pull a pallet with a round bale on it, barely. That area was easy to get to.
2) Last place I fed hay, when I forked the hay off, it was a good mixture of manure/pee/hay for composting and the soil underneath was black, moist and fluffy and had the biggest worms I've seen here.
I'm sure it also dumps a bunch of grass seed as well though so weeding will be nearly impossible to keep up with this year. There's a property down the road that had a bunch of blue barrels get strewn around during a storm 4-5 years ago and they've left them just sitting in the woods since. Gonna stop by and ask if I can have them. Maybe I'll just do container taters this year. 10-15 open bottomed half sections ought to grow quite a bit.
I lay the potatoes directly on the ground inside the bucket, add some bone meal, and then cover the seed potatoes with wood chips. As the plants grow, I add more wood chips.
Don't know any place to get wood chips. I've heard of people using straw though and I can get that but have to travel quite a ways.
I actually have used the river boat in my perch pond. Twice, in fact.
Before I had the diffused aeration system going there were two instances of a blue-green algae bloom starting, so I backed the boat in just deep enough to fully submerge the jet pump and gave the pond a good stirring.
I’m looking forward to getting on the water with the new trolling motor setup. This one has integrated GPS, and it will connect, directly or networked, to current generation Garmin chart plotters/graphs.
100+ mile round trip for straw. I do have lots of oak leaves I can mulch with the mower.
That’s just gorgeous!
We found a bunch of wood chips on our property from the previous owner, and our tractor has a chipper attachment so we spent some time last summer chipping up a bunch of branches we found strewn around the property, plus some from trees we thinned out.
Pine and cedar are a pain to chip. They do chip easily enough as the wood is soft, but they tend to gum up the chipper.
What I am saying is, don’t save your table potatoes that have sprouted. Don’t plant them. They are a nightshade.
Cerified seed potatoes are seed that has been certified for purity and freedom from disease by the Dept of Agriculture. They are clones.
Some more blight info: https://blogs.cornell.edu/livegpath/gallery/tomato/tomato-late-blight/
Rain tonight here late; thunderstorms with chance of a brief tornado. Normal spring weather.
Ellendra; looks like a good way to do this, especially if you have a lot of spoiled straw.
3 Ways of growing potatoes under straw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYL4B6KlvyM
A pleasant young lady w chickens in the back ground hilling potatoes with straw.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxojKXEekgQ
Maybe I will try one of these (For fun!) (Potato tower does not require much of a garden foot print!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R833pkaDBSY
Oak leaf compost is supposed to be helpful eliminating root knot nematodes, and I suppose other things.
I am thankful to the photographer that took the picture and the Japanese who live there. They very deliberately work together to grow the Cherry blossom tree Park that surrounds their towns. It is beautiful!
I put three small square bales of alfalfa in the pond as it was filling to provide food for development of the planktonic community, but I haven’t seen any need for the addition of barley straw.
I stocked 100 northern crayfish mid-summer of ‘19. They do a nice job of keeping the filamentous algae from ever getting thick enough to form those nasty floating mats of bubbly goo.
Companion Planting Flowers and Herbs in the Vegetable Garden
(Attract the good bugs and repel the pests)
There is no rule that states vegetables and flowers can’t mix. In fact, a vegetable garden benefits greatly from the addition of flowers and herbs. But it’s not just aesthetics that make flowering plants welcome in the vegetable garden.
Companion planting flowers and herbs with vegetables offers several beneficial features that can protect your vegetables from insect pests and may even make them more productive.
They Act as Trap Crops
If you can’t repel a pest, plant a sacrificial plant to attract them. This is often accomplished with another vegetable crop, such as surrounding cabbage with a trap crop (or catch crop) of collards to attract the diamondback moth.
The pest insect will congregate on the trap crop, which you can then hand pick and destroy. The most famous flower trap crop is probably nasturtiums, which attract aphids. Nicotiana is also a viable trap crop. Chervil keeps slugs away from your leafy greens, and mustard attracts lygus bugs (tarnish bugs) to keep them away from your apples and strawberries.
Before you plant trap crops, weigh the risk of attracting more of the pest to your garden than before. The trap crop technique is generally used the year after a pest has done significant damage to your plants. If you can, time it so that the trap crop is more mature than the plant it’s protecting.
They Attract Pollinators
Vegetables don’t always have the showiest flowers. To make sure bees and other pollinators can find your vegetable plants, companion plant flowers with high nectar concentrations or in shades of blue, yellow, or white. And, don’t overlook flowering herbs.
Herbs in the mint family, such as oregano and thyme, are particular favorites of bees. Of course, you will have to stop harvesting a few plants to give them time to set buds and flower. Some additional choices include cosmos, larkspur, mints (watch for invasiveness or plant in a container), sunflowers, sweet peas, and zinnias.
They Attract Beneficial Insects
Most insects are not garden pests, and some insects prey on the actual pests. These beneficial include insects such as ladybugs, lacewings, parasitic wasps, and ground beetles.
As with every other insect, beneficial insects have certain preferences in plants. Companion-plant their favorites, and you’ll eventually have beneficial insects patrolling to consume your bad insects. Parsley, dill, coriander, and flowers from the aster family are especially good for attracting beneficial insects.
They Repel Garden Pests
It is still questionable whether some plants actually repel garden pests or just make for a healthier ecosystem. But the topic is worth further study, and it sure can’t hurt to try some of these companion pairings if you have a problem in your garden:
Anise hyssop to repel cabbage moths
Borage to repel tomato hornworm
Catmint to repel aphids, Colorado potato beetles, and squash bugs (verify if it is invasive in your area; it’s a fast-grower)
Geraniums (Pelargonium) to repel Japanese beetles
Pot marigolds to repel asparagus beetles
Sage to repel cabbage moths and carrot rust flies
They Promote Biodiversity
What all this companion planting is leading to is the concept of biodiversity, or planting a wide variety of plants rather than a single monocrop. Diversity helps to confuse insect pests by planting things they love with things they won’t touch as well as to attract beneficial insects that can keep pests in check. Whether there is also a symbiotic relationship between different plant species is still being studied.
You Can Hide the Cutting Garden
One final bonus of companion planting flowers in the vegetable garden is the ability to place your cutting garden where it won’t be judged for its design or appearance. If you want to plant black-eyed Susan, celosia, salvia, and zinnias in straight rows that will always be halfway cut down, plant them among the vegetables where looks don’t count as much as function. Let them do dual duty as cut flowers and pollinator lures.
Companion planting vegetables, herbs, and flowers is how the original cottage garden style evolved. Sectioning off gardens for specific types of plants was a luxury of the rich.
Besides all of the benefits outlined above, if you are short on space or time, companion planting could be the answer to some gardening dilemmas.
https://www.thespruce.com/interplanting-flowers-and-herbs-in-the-vegetable-garden-1402759
My method was kind of the result of necessity. The way my potato patch is situated, it’s pretty much impossible to hill them after they start growing. Add to that the fact that I have a hard time digging, and some very aggressive weeds to contend with.
My method is to first till the area well, then lay the seed potatoes directly onto the ground. Cover with a very thick layer of straw, then top it with some kind of mesh fencing laid flat. That last step is because of the high winds on my farm. There are times you can get blown sideways out there! Pinning down the fencing is sometimes a tricky job, my soil has a lot of rocks.
Potatoes can find their way through just about any covering. One time I stored some seed potatoes in a paper bag, which was inside a cardboard box, with every possible opening taped shut, which was then stored in the darkest corner of my basement. I was late getting things planted that year, and by the time I got around to planting potatoes, they had forced their way through the corner of the box and were sticking out 2 feet high!
So, don’t be afraid to really pile the mulch on. You’re not going to smother them.
I’ve never tried it with woodchips, but it seems like any high-carbon, low nitrogen material ought to work, as long as it’s soft enough not to damage the potatoes. Shredded leaves or ground-up corncobs should also work fine.
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