Planting Potatoes in Straw! NO MORE DIGGING!

hi everybody welcome to living traditions homestead my name is Sarah this is my husband Kevin today is potato planting day it is a gorgeous day maybe the most gorgeous of the week so it's a great day to be working in the garden if you remember a couple days ago in one of our videos we showed you how to cut your seed potatoes and let them dry so that they can be ready for planting well it's been about three days now since we've done that and they are definitely ready to get in the ground this year we're doing something a little bit different the last couple years we've planted our potatoes in one of our raised bed gardens and this year we're gonna put it in our spring in ground garden we're gonna be planting it in a row that has the black woven ground cover on either side and we're going to do a trick something new to us that we saw that was super successful for art and Brie if you haven't checked out their channel they have a really great homesteading vlog channel there's such a sweet family go ahead and check them out again their name is Arden Bree and last year they did a planting method for their potatoes that worked out really well they didn't actually have to do a lot of digging to get the potatoes and so we're gonna be trying that out we'll show you when we get out to the garden but we're so happy that we saw that from them i double-checked with them this year to make sure that they liked that method well enough to do it again this year and they did say that they already have their spring potatoes planted and we'll be using this method again so that is super encouraging right yeah anything that can save us some digging when we get to the end of the season is okay by me because here in the Ozarks by the end of the season our ground is pretty hard and digging up the potatoes is quite a chore now when it comes to growing potatoes we have to admit that it's one of the few things that we feel like we've struggled with for several years we never do quite as well as we hope that we would so we hope that this new system this year will help us and it may be something that we continue to do down the road because our family eats a lot of potatoes and so if this is successful this year hopefully next year we can plant even more and have a great harvest so again we're going to be planting 250 foot rows one of Kennebec and then the other row will be a mixture of potatoes that we've kind of accumulated over the last year and I've started growing in my potato bin in the kitchen yeah some of them are Yukon Gold some of them are some purple seed potatoes that someone gave us at the farmers market last year and I think the mystery potatoes yeah and some mystery potatoes so we'll see how all of those do and we'll see which ones do the best so let's head over to the garden we actually have one update that we want to share with you in the garden as well so you'll notice that we have our floating row covers open this isn't something that I wanted to have to do I was hoping to be able to keep them closed all the time but I put a thermometer underneath to see what the temperature was getting into because to me it felt kind of warm when I went to check on the plants and it was getting into the 90s underneath the floating row covers which for brassicas is way too hot I'm afraid it's going to make them bolt and then we won't get a harvest so initially I thought well we were using these heavy-duty row covers that would help protect from frost I thought well maybe we just need to switch to the lighter ones that we got so we put lighter ones on a couple rows to compare the difference and even the really thin ones are still holding in the heat and getting up to you know the upper 80s or low 90s and so we just opened them all up for the day today I do have a message into a grower solution to get some advice see if they have something that they think would work better but other than that I think our option is to open them during the day and shut them during the night that's not ideal but I did read that the cabbage moths which lay the eggs for the cabbage worms our most active at night so I'm hoping that at least if we can close them at night it might help prevent some of that I know it's not an ideal situation but it's what we're dealing with and it sure beats spraying with some type of chemical you know leaving them open I'd rather take my chances with the bugs than to lose our entire harvest guaranteed so that's where we're at so along with cutting the potatoes there's an eye on each one before we plant them we're going to dust them in sulfur and we just get a big bag to the 4 pound bag of sulfur we got it at our just local you know AG store from MFA and we bought ours for it's only 5 dollars and 80 cents so it's not that expensive so we're gonna put some of the sulfur down in a bag and then we'll put the potato pieces in there and just kind of jostle them around a little bit in there to coat them and the sulfur will act as a fungicide and will prevent the potato from rotting in the ground before it starts to grow there's really no magic formula to this just gonna put some it in here making sure not to breathe it in and put some of the potatoes in there I'm actually gonna put all of the potatoes that we're going to plant in the first row so these are the Kennebec potatoes so I can just take them all I can just take them over to the row in the bag we're gonna be terribly so they don't knock any of the eyes off that looks perfect so let's get started we'll go down to the row and get planting [Music] so I'm just making a trough not very deep but three inches deep the system that we're going to use for planting the potatoes this year we actually want them on the shallow side so what we'll do is we'll just walk along and drop our seed potatoes about every foot and then we'll cover them back up with dirt and then on top of that we're gonna put a layer of straw and we'll talk to you more about that when we get to that step [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] as much as you can you want to make sure that the eyes on the potatoes are pointed up now sometimes they have all over the potato just do the best you can they want to give him the best chance possible to succeed [Music] [Music] [Music] well both rows are planted I'm super excited I don't think we've ever planted this with many potatoes before so hopefully it works out and we get tons of potatoes but like we said before we're going to be doing this a little bit differently this year so the way that we've learned in the past is to plant the potatoes relatively deeply and then as the plant part starts coming through the ground you continue to backfill over it and piled dirt higher and higher and that way your potatoes will grow all through that dirt well this year instead of back filling and piling the dirt higher and higher we're going to be using straw I'm going to laying down just a couple inches at first today and water it so it stays in place we've actually been having quite a bit of wind and then as the plants continue to protrude through the straw we'll backfill with more straw over the course of the spring now this is a part of the planting where Kevin must exit the video he is actually really really allergic to straw he can bring me the Bale but then he's got take off otherwise actually for days he'll have a ton of asthma so this part is up to me [Music] well that is a good job done and that means that our entire Spring Garden is completely planted now we just need to wait for May and do the summer garden let's go figure out what Kevin has been doing I know he didn't just go in the house to be lazy and sit down watch TV so let's go see what he's been doing while I've been working here in the garden hi hey what are you doing so this is the area that we're working on for setting aside for the cow we've been reading a lot of your comments today we've got a lot of thinking to do about whether or not we want to keep the cow and the goats together so maybe some changing plans but for right now I'm just trying to clean up this cow area but we're well on our way just trying to get some of this really big stuff out of the way the multi kind of stuff will be fine that will break down pretty quickly I'm not worried about that just some of this bigger stuff honestly I've been out here for less than two hours and I've got it almost done already so I can't imagine if I would have to do clearer all of this land by hand it would have taken me forever so I'll just make this into a couple piles and burn it up and we'll be all done so you guys it's been a good day on the homestead we love hard work around here it beats sitting at a desk any single day so spring garden is completely planted we can just do them right I bet you thought when Sara was finishing the potatoes that I just went in the house to watch my soap operas there so but I did I came out here to work on the cows yeah you guys so thanks for joining us today we really appreciate it if you're not if you're not a subscriber yet please consider subscribing below make sure you share our channel with all your family and friends or whoever you think might enjoy what we're doing here and until next time thanks so much for stopping by the homestead take care and God bless god bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 223,306

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing, planting potatoes, planting potatoes in straw, floating row covers, living traditions homestead garden

Id: 26H2UdAdrWY

Length: 13min 2sec (782 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 28 2019