Potato and Onion Planting

Over the years of gardening I have always been curious about other crops that I could grow. I typically tend to stick with the easier familiar crops like tomatoes and sugar snap peas but every once in awhile, I get the urge to try something different. The thought of planting potatoes has never crossed my mind and still think of it as a very difficult crop to grow. Until now, I never had the desire, but this year I am going to try it out. I did not look at any instructions for growing them until I received the potatoes in the mail in March. 

I put them in a dark closet and left them until the last minute. I think that I have been avoiding it, for the possible dread that after I knew the amount of work behind it could influence my decision and I might avoid it all together. I decided to just dive in and do it. 

When I started my search for tubers online I was only able to find a handful of sites which mentioned selling them, but they were either sold out or not available. This was in December and this may have been too early as I really didn’t know much about them. I started looking again in January and found Renees Garden online. I chose 3 varieties to start with and bought ones that looked similar to ones I typically would purchase at the grocery store. The three varieties are Yukon Gem, Red Sangre and of course I needed try something completely different and chose a low glycemic potato called Huckleberry Gold. 

The next step was deciding where they would be planted and what companion plants that I could grow with them. I chose to also try growing onions which Ive read make good companions with potatoes, At least I hope they do. Here I am Aril 22 and planting them both out. They are the first crops to go in the ground. The carrot seeds were also planted last weekend.

The pictures shown here are of me planting the onions on the perimeter of the potato bed. This was taken after I got off work in the evening so I was a little rushed and forgot to get a picture of the potatoes that I planted. Once they start to grow I will post some progress.

Planting Ranunculus

Since this is my second time growing ranunculus I have done a lot of reading up on how to presprout and what other people recommend as far as planting times and my growing zone, digging up and storing and just overall how to care for them. I really love this flower and was willing to do whatever I had to in order to enjoy these pretty blooms. 

Early fall of 2023, my experience in digging them up had to be the most time consuming task that Ive ever encountered with a single flower, mostly because I wasn’t ready for them to multiply like they did. 

I was excited for this, but since I decided to do this on a work night late, and didn’t finish until 11pm, it made the whole process seem like too much. I wasn’t  prepared for the amount of time I would need to wash them and dry them.

This spring Ive been looking forward to planting them again, but this time I don’t think that I will be digging them and storing them. There was one corm (pictured above) that I forgot to dig up in the fall and it is now blooming a beautiful shade of red. This made me realize that if this one corm made it through the cold winter here, that I could possibly leave them to overwinter in the ground and cover them with heavy mulch. Its worth a try and would save me a lot of time. 

I’m excited to think of that possibility and hope they are successful. The weather has been cold last couple weeks so I decided to plant all of my corms from the presprouts now. From the corms that I purchased last year they tripled in quantity and about half of them did not pass the presprouting test. I have no idea what colors that I have anymore as I lost track during the digging up process but this makes it a little more exciting and I am looking forward to more blooms very soon.