Road to Emmaus: Taters and hay

Our family has always relied heavily on potatoes, and so we've always had a pretty large potato patch each year. There are two main issues we generally deal with in growing potatoes. First, there's the potato bugs. Second, there's the weeding.

We've largely solved the first problem in two ways. First, we use "King Harry" potatoes, which are a variety of potatoes that, for whatever reason, potato bugs don't care for. In fact, they leave them alone almost entirely. From what I've read, it appears these potatoes have unusually long hairy fibers on the leaves, which deters the bugs. Regardless of the reason, they come as advertised and the bugs basically leave them alone.

Regarding the weeds, in the past we've tried different things, with straw mulch being the best option normally. But, I don't have straw, but do have hay, so last year we clipped the couple acres of hay and used some of it to mulch the potato patch with. It worked even better than we expected. We plant the potatoes, and then spread the hay over the potatoes. The potatoes seem to pop up through, but most of the weeds don't. You will have a few weeds get through, but they're easy to pull. Plus, this method keeps the ground moist, and also helps protect the tubers from the sun if they happen to bulge through the surface. Since it worked so well last year, we decided to do it again this year.

I also used the hay to mulch our blackberries and grapes. I'm thinking of using the hay to mulch our asparagus too.

In addition to the potatoes, we planted a large bed of sweet corn--in two batches about a week apart to stagger the harvest. We also got some more blackberry vines (these are thornless) and raspberries, so I worked up some new beds for them.

Last fall I broke some new ground on what I thought was some pretty good soil, but turned out to be pretty rocky. So, we decided to put most of our melons and squash in this area. What we did is dug out a 3 foot by 1 foot deep hole and mixed in some composted horse manure we have, and then planted in to those areas. We are then going to cover the whole bed with black plastic to keep the weeds down and add to the heat. For the squash/pumpkin patch, we'll probably just use hay, but we're considering using plastic for that as well.