Its a *itch. LOL

Gloria!

The novice vegetable gardener would be best off growing ..

.. ?

Steve

Shoot, it ain't so bad, as long as you can handle the short season and not having an actual spring or fall.

The thing I have always found funny is the direction on some seeds to "sow as soon as soil can be worked" does that mean I can plant beet seeds in late January? That's about as soon as I can work the soil, the fact it may freeze again notwithstanding.

Another fun thing is watching the weekly forecast. It will say on Sunday that Thursday is going be sunny and 70°, then by Tuesday night its changes to snow and 30°, by the time Thursday actually gets here it will say rainy and 50° but we will actually see a foot of snow, and that's just your weather from about now until mid May.

One thing that makes the bizarre weather a little more tolerable is the fact we don't get bugs and diseases like other places. Everyone has their own unique brand if challenges I suppose.

The recent hot weather caused me to spring out of winter dormancy like all the iris bulbs and yarrow in my neighborhood. So I've jumped the gun and started a flat today of 72 various pepper seeds. Time will tell if it's too early or not. Otherwise the swinging temps don't really get to my plants in the ground too hard so long as I don't try to get them out too early.

Zach I bet beet seeds planted in January would be sprouting now and those beet plants seem largely freeze proof.

Freeze proof, perhaps for the most part. But with the sun so low on the horizon and nightly temps still in the 20s I doubt you would harvest them any earlier. Nothing gained there except extra work tending to them when the mercury dips into ranges too cold for even the hardiest of species (11° low for either Sunday or Monday next week).

Saw a couple crocus flowers in the neighbors yard today, the ones I planted last fall haven't even broken the surface, I suspect they're dead. Spring planted tulips and the irises I moved last summer are coming up though, there is light at the end of the tunnel eh?

Try it, you’ll like it, Digit! I’ve been out gardening all winter! Just spent a couple more hours out in the
yard again today! And supposed to be in
the upper 60s again for the next couple days!
Then we’re in for a—uhhh—change!

Hey! If you lived
here you could come to our swaps! We’d
all like that! :-)

Skybird

I'm not sure if I'd even know how to grow spuds.

Peas should do okay or do the burn up before producing anything?

Beets? Yeah, they grow sugar beets in WY.

Steve

I think we need to vote on whether Steve should come Denver, I say "AYE!"

Spuds are easy peasy, so long as you put a little effort into the dirt you plant them in, they don;t really need any special attention from you the rest of the season.

I haven't grown pea in a while, but I have a spot reserved for them this year, it get's afternoon shade otherwise, I too, would worry about them burning up when we get 80F in May (the day after a snowstorm haha)

AYE!

Potatoes can be grown in straight, undecomposed, compost! And peas do remarkably well in morning sun with some shade from midday on!

Whatdidya get yourself into, Digit???

Oh, I just thought of something when you brought up sugar beets Steve... My dad lives in Ft. Morgan, a small town out on the prairie. About 10 miles west of him is another small town called Brush. In that area, sugar beets have been a cash crap for a loooong time... the high school mascot in Brush.... The BEET DIGGERS!

Never though of growing spuds in my compost! Course, my compost area is awful small, not sure how many I'd get at the end of it, especially after I had been turning it all season! Good to know about the peas, I have been somewhat concerned they wouldn't get enough sun, and they are the kiddos favorite veggie (maybe the only one he will eat out of the garden, we'll see)

One of the early rich dudes in this part of the world started off in Colorado working in his brother's freight-hauling company. He came here with financing to build a railroad into the mining district.

After those big Robber Barons back east bought out his investors and the company, he decided to put in an irrigation district with canals from the Spokane River. One thing that might have prompted him to do this was, besides knowing about grades, he had started a sugar beet farm. Neither enterprise worked out real well but they kinda fit with his third scheme, a horse racing track. The glacial till in the valley didn't lend itself to successful flood irrigation.

There was a sugar beet operation near Moses Lake when I got here in the sixties. I think the industry was really expanding then because of the embargo on Cuba (or, "Cub'r," as JFK called it). I wonder how things might change now ...

Steve

Compost Pile Potato Garden - 2007

Zach, here’s how to grow potatoes in a compost pile! I’m gonna hijack Digit’s thread!

Since I don’t “do” pics anymore—for now at least, here’s the
History of my Compost Pile Potato Garden in olde threads!

The first thread/pic if from 2007, the year I first
discovered that “old” potatoes I had thrown onto the compost pile had started
to grow in it!

The links are apparently “on top” now, so see what I’m
talking about by going to the old thread!

[And it looks like most of these threads were composed on Word,
and they would have looked “ok” when I originally posted them, but when iV took
over anything that was, or had previously been copied from Word, went
kaflooey! On iV everything that now
looks like a “capital A” looked like a solid black diamond!]

Compost Pile Potato Garden - 2008

Then we get to 2008!
That’s the year I intentionally pulled some of the halfway finished
compost down to a corner of the pile and “planted” my growing potatoes from the
kitchen cabinet in it—just made a layer of “compost,” laid the potatoes on it,
and pulled a bunch more on top of them!

Compost Pile Potato Garden – 2009 – Part I

2009 was a very good year!
I got TWO crops! That was the
year I put in some “walls” to “contain” the compost! In 2008 I had had a problem with the compost
constantly spreading out all over the place, so I had trouble keeping it “deep
enough!” In the same place I had grown them the
previous year, I constructed a “formal” potato garden out of some scrap 2 X 12
pieces I had laying around!

The second linked thread has a pic of both my first harvest,
and my second crop that year, which I planted about the middle of August, and
“harvested” on October 20, after we had gotten a hard freeze while I was on a
trip! [It’s my understanding we can post
more than just one link here now, so let me see if this works!!!]

Compost Pile Potato Garden – 2009 – Part II

If there's a way to attach a second link, I don't see it, so here's Part II of 2009!

Compost Pile Potato Garden - 2010

In 2010 I just used the “compost” I had used the year
before—which was “dirt” by then! I wound
up deciding that they didn’t do as well in the completely decomposed compost!

Compost Pile Potato Garden - 2011.

So in 2011 I dug out all the finished compost and used it
when planting perennials, and when I “planted” my Kitchen Variety potatoes, I
started with more unfinished compost—and I’ve gradually evolved to “mostly”
unfinished compost! Now I mostly take
something like some of the maple leaves that have been laying out there in bags
all winter, but enough water has gotten into the bags that they’re saturated
and maybe just starting to decompose—and usually have a buncha worms in them,
and after putting the potatoes down in the bottom on the bare soil, I fill the
“potato garden” up to the top with the leaves—or anything small enough that’s
easily accessible on The Pile!

The whole thing is quite small, I really don’t have room to
plant more, but they’re SO good I can’t imagine being without them anymore! And I’ve NEVER planted a real live “seed
potato!” Everything I’ve planted were
the store bought potatoes I had in my cabinet that had started to grow! Right now I have some in the cabinet that
need to be planted—and I’m serious! I
almost did it a couple days ago, and then found out it was gonna get COLD, so I
decided to wait till it warms up later in the week! I’ll plant them and then throw a couple bags
of maple leaves on top of them to keep them from freezing too badly! The one year I know some of the ones growing
in the compost pile had been out there all winter—and they didn’t have any
special protection—they were just wherever they happened to land in the
pile! When the weather starts to warm
they’ll start growing, and I’ll remove the bags to see if there’s anything
there yet every now and then, and if they start growing “too early” and I need
to take the bags off, I just dump a pile of loose maple leaves on top of them
if it’s gonna get “too” cold. I’m not
paying for seed potatoes, so if they do buy it, I really haven’t lost anything,
but that hasn’t happened yet!

Try it, you’ll like it!
They are SO easy to harvest, and they come out so nice and clean!

Skybird

Your bookmarks are coming in handy, Skybird.

There is a way to make potato growing a lot more work, if'n ya got the room and compost. Have the bed of spuds the primary location for the previous year's compost along about the first week of June.

Potatoes are heavy feeders so I sprinkle a little fertilizer first. Then, the "mostly" finished compost goes on top as mulch.

If the spuds are an early variety like Yukon Gold, the harvest can begin in late July. Seed for fall greens can go in that soil. The following year, that bed could be used for most anything and a new bed can benefit from the compost.

If it sounds like growing potatoes under straw -- that's not what I'm sayin'. After one season of making the vole population extremely happy and, no doubt, FAT, I am not planning on growing potatoes under straw again. Nope.

:o) Steve

That's a great system! I am definitely going to try it with some extra potatoes this year, along with the others, which are going to be about 40% of my gardening space this year. Of all the things I have grown, I think potatoes have proven to be the most popular. Well, besides my hab jelly... (Though, personally, I am a sucker for a good tomato sandwitch.)

You've convinced me to try compost potatoes this year, it sounds so easy! should I construct a bin for the heap?

And will they do ok in 100% partially decomposed leaves or should I mix in some more finished compost or bone meal or both since potatoes like to feed so much?