Finally, a tolerable weekend. So what if it’s Mother’s Day? We are planting potatoes!
Since we knew the girls would all come visit today, we decided to make good use of the available help and put them to work out in the field — after a tasty breakfast of French toast by Emily, followed by coffee brought by Anna.
And, we managed to get four rows (130 feet each) of potatoes in the ground! We still have a bunch more to go but it was a great start.
We used the blue Ford (which I am now referring to as Harrison Ford) and what Jeff calls a “horse hoe” to lay out our rows and to cover the potatoes.
We learned we don’t want to keep doing that. It’s quite labor intensive (thanks, Bethy, for taking one for the team!) and really hard to make a straight row because it is literal manpower holding the horse hoe when it hits a rock or clump of sod. Doesn’t matter how strong you are, that hoe is going sideways. So as I write this blog post, Jeff is shopping for new equipment online and grilling burgers for dinner.
Today, we managed to get in our early potatoes, the ol’ standby Dark Red Norlands, as well as a new variety called Caribou that was developed at the University of Maine. Pretty cool. As mentioned earlier, we still have several varieties left to plant, but the plan is to do that after we figure out a more efficient way to create straight rows.
But, it was a great afternoon of planting with the girls, which is all this Mom could hope for on Mother’s Day.
Two Rock Ridge Farm 