07/26/13

I was suffering from a lack of motivation this evening, and likely would not have accomplished anything if not for Andrea. She went out to work in the herb garden, though, and so eventually I went out to help her. We ended up spending the rest of the evening working outside. I just needed that help to get going.

One small section of the herb garden, which had not been planted in anything, had gotten out of control with weeds. When I mowed weeds a few days ago Andrea had me mow that area of the herb garden as well. Today she put down cardboard, to prevent them from coming back, then planted some flowers so there would be something there. Once that was done she applied a layer of paper mulch, so the entire herb garden will have a consistent appearance.

Once that was done I helped her work on the next section of the herb garden, which also was suffering from not being planted. This is the small area directly in front of the porch. Our plan was to plant sunflowers here, so they would provide some shading of the porch. We never got around to that, however, and now its too late.To keep the area from being over taken by weeds again, though, we decided to plant it in something. We used two old landscape timbers to define the edge of the bed, since we haven't been able to extend the rock border out that far yet. We then put down cardboard. We wanted to apply a thin layer of topsoil on top of the cardboard, so started thinking of places to get it. I suggested we go ahead and harvest the potatoes from the potato tower, and use that soil. It turns out that the soil from the tower was just the right amount. After using it to cover the cardboard Andrea sewed a mixture of Marigolds, Calendula, and Echinacea. She chose those primarily because she had extra seed that needed to be used up anyway.

I'll be discussing the results of the potato tower in more detail when I do a post on our potato growing results, but thought I'd go ahead and share a bit here. The results weren't as great as I had hoped but they weren't bad. The tower had held four plants, which yielded twenty-two potatoes plus a handful of tiny ones. Four of the potatoes were good sized, with the others being approximately golf ball sized. Total yield was just under two and a half pounds. Assuming we planted 7.5 ounces initially, based on the average weight of what was planted, the yield was just over five times that, which is respectable. I'm looking forward to seeing how the other plants of this variety performed.