March 29th, 2020 Clean-up time

Weather is the major hold-up for house building. We have all of the wood, and have ordered the roof trusses (coming on Tuesday), but what we need is some predictably dry weather to put the whole thing up. Until then, maybe three weeks away, we are working the Gardens and anticipating our food production this year.

The Corona Virus has us thinking that our gardens might just be very important to us and to those around us for bringing food to the table. Field workers that usually produce our vegetables may be a bit hard to find this year in California and other big productions states. I encourage everyone to get ready to grow some food. The Corona Virus has us all locked down and the self imposed quarantine looks like it might work. Hopefully our world will return to work this Summer, but it looks like things will be pretty hard on people for the next four months or so. I spent some time writing three articles about growing food at home in hopes that people will understand the serious problem we will all have with fresh food supplies for the next year as the Virus shakes out.

This will be our third growing season. So far we haven't done very well at farming but have learned a great deal and have some new plans to follow. This year we have brought about twenty-five yards of horse manure compost to the Farm to till into the soils. Since many of the rows we have cultivated  are already pretty rich we should do much better this year than last. We have also bought  fifty cubic feet of coco noir and peat mix to till into tomatoes and peppers, which like an acidic soil. On top of this we are bringing in sixty cubic feet of perlite to make some new carrot beds with exceptionally light soils made by combining compost with coco noir, peat, and a whole lot of perlite. The new carrot bed will be dug one foot into the clay, and have a one foot high raised bed, so the soils will eventually become two feet deep. We will put down screen mesh at the bottom of this new bed to keep the gophers and rats out, and some rabbit proof screen covers to secure the top.

We haven't seen nearly as many squirrels and rabbits as last year, and the rats are  keeping themselves well hidden. But we are prepared for the eventual rodent wars this year. Our little rifle is loaded and our hounds have already caught one rabbit. We haven't seen many gophers this year either, but there are still a few around and we have a plan to remove them once we figure out where they will pop up.

All of the fences we planned to move six weeks ago are in their new places. We have restricted dog movement to the central third of the Farm to give the plants a better chance.The Kitchen Garden layout is in place and is mulched in very well, but the Kirchen Garden won't be planted this year. Since we have  deeply tilled most of the dirt  for three years the weed seed load ought to be starting to slack off , so this year we will only till about the top inch in hopes of not needing to do so much weeding.

We spent a few days getting the weeds under control in the Strawberry patch last week . Last year I was tilling and mulching the rows when the tree hit me and the patch sort of went ferrel This year we are starting cultivation much earlier and the plants are well established. We ought to get a good crop this season. But the work is hard in late Winter and we are out of shape, so far we have tilled between all of the rows, are carefully removing the weeds in the rows themselves. and mulching everything heavily. The Strawberry Tower we put up last year is weeded out and mulched for the season, so hopefully we'll finally see if the tower idea works . May looks good for picking Strawberries.

Staying home is our primary occupation, so the Corona Virus doesn't change much for us. But if you find yourself needing some time out of the house you are welcome to come and put your hands in the dirt, or pet some dogs. We do social distancing very well here, and we both had the virus in January, so it is pretty safe here and you are all welcome.

Revisiting the Victory Garden : A Well Rounded Diet

Potatoes and Beans make for good eating, and if you buy some meat, catch fish, or raise chickens and ducks, you will have enough calories and trace minerals to live. But simply living isn't the same as living well. To live well you need variety and vitamins.  Depending on the space you have, and the mulch you can make, and the water you can distribute to plants, you can grow nearly anything from fruits to nuts. If you have the time and space, you can grow grapes or grains sufficient to make wine or beer and call it a victory, but the Victory Garden is about food and survival during hard times.

This last installment of the Victory Garden series is a discussion about the sorts of plants you can add to your Victory Garden to keep healthy year after year. These are the sorts of foods that put color on your plate and give you the thiamine, vitamins (A, B, C, E), magnesium, calcium, and a few other key ingredients for a happy life, not just a full belly.

There are no hard and fast rules for growing these crops since the types of plants are widely varied, but generally the plants I'm talking about are listed below in order of importance and stability. If you have to make difficult choices, grow potatoes and store the excess first. If there is still some room, grow beans and peas and dry the excess second. The list below is for those with more space than they can reasonably use for potatoes and beans. This post is a much bigger garden concept. One where you can potentially sustain yourself and your family for years. Today may not be all too dire a situation for us, but putting these thought into your head now allow you to formulate for the future and gives you something positive to do today.

The plants on the list below are put there in the order I think is most profitable from the daily  nutritional intake viewpoint. Saying this, it must also be said that there are many crops that are more immediately nutritious. Spinach, Kale, Broccoli, and Carrots, are all wonderful crops. But, except for roots like carrots, these crops don't store very well out of season and all are fairly monochromatic as menu items.

Grow all of the food you have room for, but feeding a family the whole year around means making practical decisions and storing foods for Winter and Spring eating to come.

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1. Squash, Cucumbers, and Pumpkins

There are two basic types of squash plants: Summer and Winter.

Crooked Neck Summer Squash

The Summer squash varieties are harvested in Summer, have a soft rind which is sometimes edible, but doesn't store well. Many people grow Summer Zucchini in their vegetable gardens, and you still might. The plants produce heavy harvests and are very much worth growing. Yellow Squash and Patty Pan are two more wonderful Summer varieties with a large followings. All of these are good to eat, but hard to store. So these should be grown only in quantities that you can eat fresh. Grow Winter varieties in much larger quantities to eat well through the off-seasons.

Patty Pan Summer Squash

Round Zucchini Summer Squash

Zucchini Summer Squash

Butternut Squash

Winter Squash is harvested in late Fall and has a hard rind which stores well. The best Winter variety choice is the Butternut Squash because it has a wonderful flavor, can be prepared in many ways, stores very well, and is extraordinarily nutritious.  Each cup of Butternut Squash provides:

• Vitamin A: 457% of the Reference Daily Intake (RDI)
• Vitamin C: 52% of the RDI
• Vitamin E: 13% of the RDI
• Thiamine (B1): 10% of the RDI
• Niacin (B3): 10% of the RDI
• Pyridoxine (B6): 13% of the RDI
• Folate (B9): 10% of the RDI
• Magnesium: 15% of the RDI
• Potassium: 17% of the RDI
• Manganese: 18% of the RDI

Acorn Squash is a good second choice for Winter Squash. As with Butternut, it grows well up until the first frost and stores easily. This is a much smaller squash fruit but has nearly as many uses.

Growing Squash

Growing squash and melons uses a lot of sunny space and well drained soils, so mounds make more sense than rows. Pots will work, providing that you give the tendrils space and the roots sufficient water and drainage.  The soil you use needs to be high in organic matter. Leaf and well  matured manure composts in mixes nearing fifty percent is ideal, but not required. A cheap way to get a lot of organic mulch is to collect leaves in the late Fall. Many neighborhoods with large street trees would likely be happy to have someone collect bag loads of the leaves and, with the Winter and Spring to break the stuff down a bit, they make a great compost in early Spring.

Corn, cucumbers, and beans can all be planted in with the squash. Corn is hard to store, so grow no more than you wish to eat in season. Corn can be frozen but is usually disappointing and with little nutrition left over afterward. Cucumbers store rather easily as pickles and offer a better payoff both nutritionally and as a menu item. Beans are always a good idea. You can also plant marigolds in with the plants to hold off the beetles too.

Harvesting and Storage

Acorn Squash

Harvesting is as simple as waiting for the tendril that feeds the fruit to wither slightly before cutting the fruit loose. Store  Winter Squash by putting the ripe fruits in a cool dry place, turning them every few weeks to allow air to move over the the skin more evenly and  avoid mold and fungus outbreaks. The Squash will last through the Spring and into the next Summer, so growing too much Butternut Squash is not easy to do if you eat it often. And, just as with beans and potatoes, the seeds you collect (wash and dry, then store in a paper sack), can be planted in the next year. 

Pumpkins

Pumpkins are an acquired taste. Most people like the taste of Pumpkin pies and cakes, but pumpkin chunks baked with a bit of sugar and spice takes some getting used to. Cooking pumpkin requires a lot of sugar and spices to mask the native flavors, but Pumpkins are easily grown, stored, and they are very nutritious. In many countries Pumpkin is common on Winter plates as a side dish. The bottom line on Pumpkins is that they are very good to grow, but not so much to eat. So it might be better to give the space over to Winter Squash.

Planting Pumpkins

Pumpkins require little care, not a lot of water, but lots of sun. The soils you can use are what farmers call "marginal". Once a Pumpkin gets established it will climb on nearly anything and grow whether you want it to or not. But it is easy to remove the plants as needed. My advice is to put pumpkins in where there is extra light and not much else. Preparing the soil with a bit of Manure compost will give the plants all they need to grow. Follow the seed packet instructions and they darned things will grow unattended, choking ot weeds better than anything else.

Harvest and storage

Pumpkins are harvested about the same way as squash Wait for the feeder tendril to wither and leave the stem on the fruits. Store away from light and turn the pumpkins ever few weeks to avoid rot. Pumpkins have a very think skin and store very well as they come from the garden. You might can pumpkin but the process is long without much payoff since they store whole and can be processed into food at any time. My advice is to process them into pie filling in Winter. 

Cucumbers

Cucumbers don't bring much to family nutrition, but they are easily pickled and so add life to otherwise dull plates. In Summer they make fine eating when soaked for a bit in vinegar with a bit of sugar and pepper or garlic. In Fall the bet thing is to pickle them and keep them in the refrigerator, or learn to make fermented pickles which do well at room temperatures.

Growing

Cucumbers are a bit of a fussy thing to grow, but once established are hard to stop. They climb on anything they can and won't do well laying on the dirt. They require lots of sand and compost mixed into the soils and regular water during fruiting of about an inch a week deposited directly on the roots. Watering leaves will lead to rot and plant stress. Cucumbers set fruit quickly once planted in the ground and grow from seed easily once the hot weather hits the soil.  Make sure to put out cucumber beetle traps and spray with the same detergent solution as described in the first Victory Garden article if the numbers of bugs gets too high.

Harvesting

Harvesting must be done daily or you'll soon find huge yellow fruit where smaller green fruit is more useful. Better to grow Cucumbers with the Tomatoes where they will receive as much attention. 

Storage

Storing Cucumbers means pickling and pressure canning, or fermenting for storage at room temperatures.

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Tomatoes and  Peppers

While caloric light-weights, Tomatoes and Peppers grow prolifically, store easily, and add thousands of menu items to the list of possible recipes. Both of these two types of plants ought to be eaten fresh in season, both carry a heavy load of vitamins and minerals which make fine Summer eating. The excess of both types are easily to preserve for Winter eating and the canning process doesn't decrease the vitamins or mineral delivery out of season.

Peppers

There are two broad categories of  peppers:

1. Hot Peppers carry capsacin, the chemical which brings the heat to dinner. capsacin is known to dramatically increase metabolism (evidenced in sweating), but has few other heath benefits. The peppers themselves carry large doses of vitamins A, B7, B12, C, E, and Folate. But these healthy vitamins are not at all dependent on the capsacin being in the peppers. The flavor of these hot varieties often are masked by the heat. Anaheim and Poblano Peppers are low in heat, large in size, and make the great pickled peppers. 
2. Cool, or sweet, peppers carry little capsasin, so they are generally not hot, but do carry the same amounts of good stuff.  They also add a flavor which some people simply don't tolerate very well. Sweet peppers, particularly Bell Peppers, are not universally loved.

There is a third, more modern, set of "cool" peppers, these are crossed breeds like "Cool Jalepeno" and "Cool Habenero". These are wonderful varieties which bring all of the rich flavor of the hot varieties without the heat. I recommend the Cool Jalepeno, (especially for canning).

Both types are good to have in the garden and, just as potatoes pair well in the garden with beans and onions, Peppers pair well with Tomatoes. This increases yield without adding much space for growing them.

Growing Peppers

Peppers like a high heat environment, so their growing season is short in Northwestern Oregon.  We solve a bit of this problem by starting the plants indoors from seed. When the plants put on their second set of full leaves you might want to cut the new growth off using a clean sharp scissor to encourage branching and higher yields. Keeping the plants in their pots in the house until late May is a good idea. Once the sun shines hot most days it is time to move them into the garden. Make sure to "harden off " the your plants by putting them near an open door or window a few days before putting the plants into the garden.

Peppers have strong roots and stems, usually not requiring any sort of support unless the soil is too loose to keep the plants upright. The plants grow very well in heat above eighty-five degrees and begin setting fruit soon after becoming established. Peppers demand well drained soil but are not at all fussy about over-watering. Build your soil using more mulch because peppers like a moist soils. Both peppers and tomatoes like a lower acidity level than most other plants, so try to include a large quantity of Peat Moss into the soil mix.

Except for mildew, peppers are fairly disease resistant, unlike tomatoes. Water ought to be delivered as close to the roots as possible early in the day, never in the evening. A half inch of water per week is a good general rule for watering. Fish emulsion fertilizers are the best naturally balanced type for peppers.

Harvesting and Storage

Peppers don't need a daily harvest. Plan for a twice weekly harvest and don't worry at all that the fruits won't last on the counter. You can collect peppers for a month or so before you need to do something with them.

Putting the fruits in a basket and storing them in a cool place will likely make them last well over a month.  But if you want to have this fresh flavor in Winter and Spring you will need to preserve them by canning after removing the seeds and stems before-hand. Make sure to wash the fruits well before cutting them and wearing latex or vinyl gloves when handling hot peppers is always a good idea.

At the end of the season, allow a few peppers to remain on the plants until fully ripe. Pick them if there is any sign of mildew. Cut these few open and wash the seeds for dry storage and for making next years crop.

Tomatoes

Beefsteak Tomoatoes

People love to grow tomatoes in Summer because they are fun to grow and usually very good at producing fruit. Some tomatoes are sweet, some a bit more acidic. The sweet varieties are hard to store, but both types are good for eating in-season and for canning.

Tomatoes are high in Phosphorous and Potassium, and have a lot of vitamin C.

There are many types of tomatoes, and many varieties within these types.

• Beefsteak tomatoes are your traditional tomato, Usually large, plump, and round. Within this type are most slicers and some sauce tomatoes.
• Cherry tomatoes. are small and round, grape, or pear shaped. They are sweeter the beefsteak tomatoes. These can be eaten as they come and are wonderful on salads.
• Cocktail tomatoes are a golf ball sized tomato. These are very good for juicing.
• Roma tomatoes are wonderful when fresh, but are also very well suited to making sauces because of their low acidity. 
• Heirloom tomatoes are too many to describe. I won't spend time on this here.

Cherry Tomatoes

Cocktail Tomatoes

I'll going to leave Cherry and Cocktail Tomatoes out of this list since they are nice to have but store poorly. For the Victory Garden to work as it should, you ought to be able to serve the fruits as they emerge from the garden and preserve the excess for eating out of season.  You may well preserve the Beefsteak varieties by canning and the your best bet for this is the Superbush variety for making sauces and paste. But the best overall tomato crop is the Roma tomato since is slices, dices, juices, and sauces very well.

Heirloom Tomatoes

Planting

Unlike most other crops, Tomatoes like more sand in their mix. The best sandy loam mix is sixty percent sand, thirty percent organic mulch, and some remaining clay. Make sure to get river sand or you might get salt into your garden soil. Strawberries also love sandy loam and grow very low, so inter-cropping these will add another crop while reducing the available light for weeds. You can also put parsley in with Tomatoes without danger of adding another flavor to the fruits.

Starting your plants indoors in March will give you a leg up on the season. Plant the starts after any chance of frost has passed. 

Trellising tomatoes, or caging, works well for keeping these fast growing plants in check, but nothing beats pruning for keeping the fruit well formed and diseases away. Make sure to only deliver water to the roots, never the leaves, since water promotes mildew. Fertilizing tomatoes is easily done. Epsom salts, fish fertilizers, and composted Horse or Cow manure applied to the surface layer of the beds will work well. Since tomatoes use up a lot of Potassium and Phosphorous you should fertilize twice monthly when fruiting to keep sugar production up.

Harvest and Storage

Tomatoes don't sit around very well. They are high in sugar and have very thin skins so mold forms quickly and ruins the fruit. You should harvest tomatoes every day and keep them at room temperature until you have time to prepare them for storage or eat them in season. Keep tomatoes separated from each other until used or processed to avoid early mold and fungus..

You can removed the skins by hot water blanching, then can the skinned whole tomatoes in a simple hot water bath canner, or you might want to cook them into sauces and can the sauce for use throughout the year. If you use meat in your sauces, then canning requires a pressure canner to safely store the sauce. 

Spaghetti Sauce is a favorite for canning, but leaving the spices out will allow for many other things, (such as chili and soup) later on. Plain tomato sauce needs inclusion of citric acid or lemon juice to preserve color and flavor. Freezing tomatoes destroys the texture of the fruit and cuts nutrition.

Onions and Garlic

Edible bulbs, like onions and garlic are absolutely the right sort of choices to make when planning your Victory Garden. Nothing brings the flavor to dishes better than onions and garlic. You can harvest onions every season, replanting those you find too small to use, and have a good crop which stores easily. The one problem with onions is that the sustainable crop probably won't look like those found at the grocery store unless you put in onion "sets". These are merely baby onions which go into the ground to grow larger. If you leave onions in the ground they will propagate there, but the resulting fruits may not look much like the store bought.  

Planting Onions

We routinely plant onion sets bought in late Winter, but most onions stored in the pantry will sprout in the Spring and do very well when re-planted. Onions inter-crop with potatoes well and should be planted in rows between the potato plants where the discourage beetles and other bugs, as well as rodents. Onions take very little room to grow, so planting them wherever you have a little space is a good idea.

It is usually  possible to buy  onion "sets" for planting in early Spring and this is by far the easiest way to get the job done. But you can plant pantry onions once they have sprouted too. The root side of an onion, used in meal preparation, can often be regrown as well. (Just put the bottom of an onion, the end with the roots showing, onto some moist soil in a pot and wait a few weeks for green to sprout.  Often there will be more than one sprout emerging so one onion can become as many as eight onion plants once you carefully cut them apart and remove any of the old onion remaining.)  Onions grown from seed are a major hassle project so I will leave this out for now.

Varieties of onions are many, but for the Victory Garden we just need three.

1. White Onions are often spicy, sometimes even hot, and most often used in meat and vegetable dishes. Baby whole white onions are popular in roasting and large onions chopped over soups, stews, and chili dishes is wonderful.
2. Yellow Onions are a bit sweet and best for cooking in sauces. You will need twice the Yellow onions as the other two.
3. Red Onions are wonderful raw and add color to dishes. These are usually mild, but have a distinctive flavor.

All three types plant as you might a daffodil. Just press them into well drained soil, about six inches apart, pointed side up, and mulch right on top of the dirt. The mulch will feed the plants as they emerge and keep weeding to a minimum.

Harvest and Storage.

Onions are finished when the leaves begin to wilt slightly or when the plant tries to begin making seeds by flowering. Flowering in Onions is called "bolting" and so if a flower stalk begins to emerge it is best to harvest that plant right away and remove the stalk because it will no longer put energy into growing the onion fruit any larger. (A "Walking Onion" is one which goes to seed, the flower stalk then falling over and creating a new onion site.)

Harvest is as simple as pulling the plant up by its leaves and leaving the onions out in the shade for a day to dry the outer skin. Never wash onions until needed for use since it increases the chances of rot. Store your onions by braiding the leaves and hanging the braids in a cool dry place. Or you can put them in a mesh bag. The only thing to be sure of is that the storage onions get enough air to stay dry. Some people like to dehydrate chopped onion too. If you have the equipment then this is a fine way to preserve you crop indefinitely.

Garlic

Garlic comes in cloves, or bulbs grouped tightly together. Most grocery store-bought garlic will grow just fine so seed garlic is plentiful. The planting and harvest of garlic is much the same as with onions, but inter-cropping garlic ought to be avoided since mature garlic in the ground may make other plant fruits a bit sour tasting.

Garlic takes 270 days to grow, so planting garlic is best done in early Fall for harvest in Early Summer. Prepare the ground using a great deal of organic matter, we use straw sewn directly into the ground because it provides drainage in Winter and plant food in Spring. Break the cloves you have into single bulbs and plant them four inches apart.

Harvest at nine months. You probably won't have the same results as the Farmer who sold you the cloves, but you will definitely have a sustainable product every year  from the first purchase. Whatever you get out of the garden should have its leaves braided and then hung dry in shade until used. The longer a garlic is hung, the heavier the flavor will become. Replant one bulb to get twelve new cloves of garlic. It is hard to grow too much.

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Other possibilities.

The list of foods you will need to grow to establish your garden as a viable supply of food, a Victory Garden, is short. Potatoes, Beans, Squash, Tomatoes, and Onions, ought to give you plenty of food choices. These alone are a Victory Garden. Growing all of these in sufficient quantities means you win. But there is always room for improvement in your diet.

Growing patches of herbs adds flavor while using little space or time. Basil is a favorite here at Creekside Farm. Rosemary, thyme, and parsley are perennial plants which require only planting them once.  The list of herbs you ill find necessary is short, Nearly every herb can be dried and stored easily for use the whole year around,

Carrots and radishes can be very finicky to grow, requiring purpose made soils with very little nitrogen in the mix. You will need a lot of peat moss and perlite mineral to make the light soils these root drops require, and no clay at all. These soils need annual renewal, so growing roots like this is a bit expensive. But, once you break to code, carrots and radishes store well, grow from seed well, and are hard to beat for nutrition with huge amounts of Vitamin A so it is well worth doing.

Cabbages, kale, and lettuce, along with broccoli and cauliflower are good nutritionally and fun to eat in-season, but these require a lot of water, time, and care. Storage of these crops is pickling. Making fermented Kim-chee using carrots, and garlic is really the only way to extend the life of these plants once harvested.  Fermenting plants is an investment in time, cash, and know how.

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I am sure there are other good choices for your garden, but the Victory Garden is not about luxurious  eating, just about subsistence eating. So making choices about what you put your time into is like planning your savings account investment: How much do I need to put in so that I can withdraw enough to get by for a long time?

The simple answer is that an adult needs about four pounds of food per day to thrive while doing laborious work.

How you grow it, how you store it, and how you prepare this four pounds a day requires that you do some careful planning, planting, and storage. What the food looks and tastes like is completely up to you.  The Victory Garden can produce enough food, if planned well, if considered carefully, and if understood by all who will eat from it as necessary.

Not everyone can do it, most simply don't have the space, but whatever space you have, whatever sunlight there is, will allow you to do some of it, reducing your food costs and increasing your self-esteem and general health. But before any of this good stuff  can take place, there is some learning to do, some plans to make. And there is no day better than today to start.

Revisiting the Victory Garden : Beans

In my last post I wrote some generalities about Potatoes. Perhaps it is my favorite thing to grow because it is so very easy and Ann can mash a potato like a professional. But the Victory Garden is not about seeing how many carbs you can feed yourself and your family, it is about feeding everyone a healthy diet for a year. This requires a lot of calories, potatoes have loads, but you also need sufficient protein and nutrients to keep everyone healthy on a limited diet. In this article I will discuss the proteins.

In a normal American diet, meat is the protein of choice. Meat usually comes with a lot of fat and unnecessary chemical content which the body must absorb or eliminate. In most third world diets protein is often eggs or fish. Eggs also come with a good fat content in the yoke and few down-sides. But raising enough protein derived solely from eggs to feed a family of four requires keeping four hens per person and this is expensive. True, you can eat the birds themselves, but chickens and eggs are a good supplemental protein or a fair cash crop if you have space and enough insects and seeds to stave off buying feed. Fish is a wonderful protein source, but again you have to eliminate the chemical content. Fishing is expensive, but it can be a cheap protein source if done regularly and with some skill learned of doing. Flesh derived protein is expensive and we are trying to eat well for little cash money and little work time in the garden. Physicians usually try to limit flesh protein to about four ounces a day in prescribed diets. So if we follow their lead we can seriously cut the food budget and be healthier by replacing flesh proteins with a better source, like beans.

There are an enormous range of beans varieties, each is distinctive in flavor, so a few varieties in your garden will open up quite a few culinary choices. Like potatoes, beans are usually fairly easy to grow, deliver many more minerals and other nutrients, and offer a wonderfully clean protein source without animal proteins down-sides. You can grow most beans varieties in fairly poor soils, using natural fertilizers, with very little work, and minimal water.

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The basic set of truths about growing a sufficient amount of bean proteins are few.

1. Truth number one is that beans love to congregate. The love company. So growing beans in the same rows as your potato crop allows two crops with the single footprint. This means better water distribution and less weeding work.
2. Truth number two is that harvesting beans twice each day will deliver more beans per plant than harvesting once per day and they are better to eat whole with their pods. Harvesting just once a day means better size of fruits, but missing a few each day happens easily. And harvesting a few times a week will give you a variety of bean sizes and storage products for Winter eating and much wider the cooking choices, but none of the qualities for eating whole with their pods.

To continue with the same organization I used in the Potato article, there are a few rules about growing beans.

1. Rule number one is that you will need to add nitrogen to the bean crop regularly. This is done by making "mulch tea" (we'll get into this later) and delivering it directly to the roots of the plants. If you combine growing potatoes and beans in the same spaces you need to avoid delivering too much mulch tea to the potatoes or they will get enormous without adding very much more fruit. You want low potatoes and tall (pole) beans to share the sunlight better.
2. Rule number two is that you will have some insect damage to the leaves, but not the fruits, and this is not at all avoidable. These same insects tend to eat potato leaves as well, but not the fruit. Getting rid of these insects will mean better crops, but chemical insecticides are expensive and really hard to get out of the fruits of both plants, so they must not be used. (Read down the page a bit and I'll try to give some ideas on how to keep the insect populations down without hurting yourself or your wallet.)
3. Rule three is that Beans are a serious commitment, much more so than potatoes. You will certainly have to put more time into the project and, depending on the type of beans you are growing, may have to construct supports or they will climb all over anything they can reach  the sunlight.

Growing beans is very easy to do, harvesting is fun and usually this can be delegated without a lot of hassle. The seeds are widely available and the fruits of your labor can be dried and saved for planting next year. Beans are a really sustainable crop which offers a great source of protein in abundance.

The chief difference between Bush and Pole Beans is the thickness of the main stem.

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Laying out your rows is perhaps the most important step.

There are two basic types of bean plants. Pole beans are vine-like and climb. Bush beans are bush like and support themselves like a shrub might. The fruit of both types is roughly the same, though not all varieties come in both types. Choosing the beans you want to try means understanding the differences prior to picking your seeds,

For me the choice comes down to deciding what type of light will be available to the plant and whether I want to build support systems for the pole beans. Once I have the garden laid out on paper I can see where the plants will shade others, retarding their growth. The sun shines directly downward only a few hours of the day and caused few shadows, for much of the day the sun either shade one side of the plant or the other. So some care ought to be used when laying out the garden to maximize available light to all of the plants.

Some Victory Gardens will have few choices, but all of them are choices about how the sunlight will work with the plants.

• For smaller spaces, like buckets or pots. a single bean plant can often be added to the top of the planter and moved to gain the best light as it comes to different places. 
• If your garden space doesn't really lend itself to rows then the best choice is to use mounds of soil distributed into the spaces you have. This allows the maximum space utilization while working around existing plantings. Simply work your beans into the mounds as space permits, more is not always better. Square foot garden schemes are a form of mound gardening, but in a frame.
• If you have space for rows, then things are easier. If you have a lawn, this is prime space for putting in rows. Laying the rows out is a matter of choice too. 

1. You might run your rows directly from east to west. This allows  sunlight running down the rows from sun-up to sun-down, but shades other plants equally depending on the time of season and the angle of the sun.  
2. You might run your rows from south to north as well. This shades other plants differently early in the day than it does late in the day, but might be better as the season changes and the sun's angle increases or decreases.

Once you have some idea of what your garden plan might look like, you can move on to picking seeds.

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Picking Seeds

Blue Lake Bush Beans
The use a lot of sunlight and
don't share space well.

All beans deliver generally the same product, but the variety determines size, use, and storage possibilities. Some people like Lima beans, I do not. Some like Asian bean pods in a salad or stir fry. Look around and pick the ones you find agreeable. Most will require the same planting, care, and you'll harvest according to the type. For this article I'm making one simple choice, the Blue Lake bean. Some simply call it the
"Green Bean", but this is misleading since all beans make "green beans" that you can eat with their pods,. You can just as easily grow Pinto, Red, Navy, Black, or White beans, and call them "green beans" if you pick them when they are very young and eat the with their pods. 
The Blue Lake bean is simple to grow, easy to care for and, depending on how you harvest it, can deliver a wide variety of bean products.

• New beans are wonderful for quick blanching and serving on a plate in-season. 
• If you let the bean gain some size it can be cooked longer to make it more tender. This is what people usually pressure can as Green Beans for off season eating.
• The pods of mature beans can be opened and the beans removed to serve (like peas), or hot bath canned for serving out of season.
• If you let the beans ripen on the vine until the pod turns brown, you will arrive with a very thick bean which is too large for simply serving on a plate. The fully formed beans can be shucked from their pods and air dried to allow for re-hydration in the off season.

Blue Lake Pole Beans
More structure, but they share space well.

There are quite a few variations on the Blue Lake Bean, both pole and bush types are readily available nearly anywhere you find seed for sale. There are many variations, but generally the fruits are roughly the same.


If you can only choose one bean to grow, the Blue Lake 247, either bush or pole variety, is a solid choice for a robust and tasty bean that has many good uses. But there a so many others worthy of some space. Just remember, the Victory Garden is about feeding people all year around, not necessarily eating well all of the time in a world with a wide range of culinary choices. 

Many, if not most, bean varieties are dehydrated for storage and served only after re-hydration in soups and stews, or canned fresh without their pods for use in cooking. All add their own flavors to whatever they are paired with and add great protein content to the dishes they are included in.

Each variety has it's own particular needs in the garden and the yields vary widely. Most are easy to grow and require little daily care other than harvesting throughout the season as they become the size you desire or the color they are supposed to become.

Peas are often considered beans since they grow in a similar way, harvest the same way, and cook in the same way. The chief difference is that peas have hollow stems, which makes them a bit more fussy and demanding of water. Peas and beans are usually shucked from their pods and dried for later use. Both are canned easily but require a pressure canner whether in or out of the pods. There is some nutritional difference, but this is mostly about variety and growing conditions. Beans like it hot, the hotter the better in most cases. Peas work better in cooler climates so they grow and ripen a bit slower.

Whether you wish to call them peas or not, you will treat both just the same. Daily picking is a must if you want your plants to keep growing new  pods, you will want to check for insects every time that you go to harvest, and you'll want to keep watering on the roots and not the leaves. If you do all of this, and follow just a few more suggestions, you will have an abundant harvest all Summer long and into the Fall.

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Fertilizers and Pest controls

The Japanese Beetle

The Japanese Beetle is our enemy here in Northwestern Oregon, and it is surprising how much damage they can do to garden crops.  Nature's cure is the Robin. But there is only so many Robins you want hanging out in the garden. 

Picking them off with your fingers is a good way to keep their populations down but removing individuals only goes so far. 

Adults eat  leaves in a pattern known as "skeletonization" (they eat the tender bits between the veins in the leaf). Seeing leaves eaten away until they look like lace is a sure sign of Japanese beetles. Adults are voracious eaters and happy propagators when well fed. The leaves they remove put the plant under stress and a colony of Japanese Beetles can empty whole plants of their leaves pretty quickly. If you find the Japanese Beetle in your garden, and it is likely that you will, picking them off of the plants in the early going is vital to your success.

The only good way to spray your plants without harmful chemicals, should the beetle be well established, is to spray with a mixture of detergent soap and water. Simply mix two or three tablespoons of  detergent soap into a gallon of water and spray it on both sides of every leaf. The beetle's breathing apparatus is on the outside and the soap covers up the gills, suffocating the beetles. The solution also kills other insects as well, so staying on top of things to avoid spraying even this nearly harmless solution will preserve helpful propagators and predator insects.  You might want to keep a jar of this soap solution in the garden so that you can drop beetle into it when you find one and pick it off the plants.

The Japanese Beetle lays its eggs in the soil which hatch larvae that eat the roots of grass plants. It is hard to keep all grasses out of the ground in a garden, especially a Victory Garden which is often surrounded by lawn. Depriving the larvae of its food will help to keep the populations lower, but if you see patches of crass dying off there is a good possibility that the beetle may be trying to establish itself. Treating the ground with chemical pesticides is the only way out of the larvae problem, so it is far better to control the adults to death than to fight with their kids.

This beetle eats a wide range of plants, but some plants actually work to block Japanese and other beetles.

• If you plant garlic, chives, leeks, or onions, in and around your crops the smell drives the beetle off.  Just remember that ripe onions and garlic can effect the taste of root vegetables like carrots radishes and potatoes. Harvesting these crops at the time they are full mature will keep things tasting right.  
• There are a few really good flowering species that block many beetle types, including the Japanese Beetle. Planting Chrysanthemums and Marigolds in a hedge shape which surrounds you garden, and perhaps in on the margins of your walking paths, will keep beetles away naturally. These flowering plants are hardy growers, even from seed, and make fantastically colored hedges at the margins of your garden, a double bonus. We often find Bumble Bees living in our Marigolds, another double bonus of having happy pollinators supported by beautiful flowers. Our Marigolds produce a tone of seeds, so if you want them to remain neat, you ought to cut the flowers off as the die back.  Planting Mums and Marigolds is highly recommended, but the Japanese Beetle will probably make it into the garden none the less.

This is not the only beetle to look out for. 

Cucumber Beetles are death to a large number of crops. Their favorite foods are cucumbers, squashes, pumpkins, and melons. All of these can be inter-planted with potatoes and beans so take care to keep a wary eye on the garden for these yellow beasties.

We have a real problem here at Creekside Farm with these yellow beetles. There are some good sticky traps you can hang out in the garden. Most have a hormone bait which hangs inside the trap. The biggest problem with these traps is keeping them dry and free of dirt that blows around. They are expensive, but also work well. Hanging traps, about one for three, thirty foot rows, catches a huge amount of beetles. For the most part it is better to catch these things and drown them in a detergent soap mixture bucket than to fight off the larvae. But if you get infested you can use the soap mixture described above or buy some Neem oil to spray. Neem oil is a natural curative, but prevention is worth many pounds of cure.

There are a myriad of other problematic bugs out there, but beetles are by far the most destructive. 

Fertilizers 

For natural fertilizer you cannot beat Mulch Tea for effectiveness and low costs. You can mulch nearly anything, put a few scoops of the mulch into a bucket with some water, and pour out the water  at the base of your plants, for a quick boost in plant nutrition. Remember than not all plants like a lot of nitrogen and most mulches are usually high in nitrogen. Nitrogen makes leaves very healthy, but also encourages root growth. In root vegetables you really only want the nitrogen at the top of the plant where leaves grow, not at the roots. So judiciously putting Mulch Tea only at the base of plants (not on the leaves themselves) will do very much good, but over fertilizing might negatively effect root crops.

Leaf mold, the leftovers from piling up disiduous  tree leaves and waiting out the Winter, does a great job of slowly releasing nutrients, and it also blocks weed seed germination too.  We build a pile of garden and yard debris from cleaning up at the end of Fall. By time early Spring arrives we  can till it into the soil to quick start the next garden. (Corn stalks mulch down slowly, so cut up the stalks to get them to break down quicker.)

Straw also blocks weeds while slowly releasing nitrogen and water. We use Straw on all of our dirt paths in Winter to keep the mud off of our shoes and then scrape it up to start the new mulch pile in late Spring. In a Ruth Stout Garden, straw becomes a deep mulch bed over years of putting new layers of straw down. This may be the best method, but we are only trying it out this year for the first time.

Nutrient poor soils, those lacking potassium in particular, can be fertilized by putting grass clippings around the base of the plants. This works especially well with fruit trees because making fruit uses a lot of potassium. Finding a professional gardener with a truck load of grass clippings he is willing to dump in a pile for you is not difficult. A word of warning about this: Grass clippings pack tightly and rot quickly, if they are not given enough oxygen will grow anaerobic bacteria which stink like elephant manure and make the mulch completely useless. Better to put the clippings out right away if you get them making sure not to put the clippings against the plants themselves. Also, grass clipping piles produce high internal temperatures, creating steam, which also smell like elephant dung. So use the clippings or turn the pile regularly to keep things fresh. Never try to make mulch tea solely using grass clipping mulch because it is a mess.

We use mulched horse manure and straw on the beds at Creekside Farm. Our beds are too numerous to use grass clippings. Manure is nutrient and nitrogen rich, but it must be at least a year in the mulch pile before it is decomposed enough to be useful. If the manure is too new there will be far too many plant eating bacteria in to for safe use on live plants, and Horse urine has entirely too much ammonia. So be sure your horse manure smells pleasant when handled before deploying it into the garden. We put out a great amount of this stuff at the onset of bed preparation for tilling into the top one inch of soil. The worms just love it and help out by pulling it down into the garden soils. Cow manure works exactly the same way, if you can get it cheaply enough. As I write this I have three truckloads of Horse manure out in piles to be distributed onto the beds to prepare for planting in a month. If the manure has been properly composted the job is really very pleasant. If the manure is too new, or there are a lot of other things mixed into it, the job can be unpleasant and difficult.

Organic chemical fertilizers are okay to use, but expensive. Try to find rotting plant solutions to feed your garden to save money and keep you food clean.

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Trellising pole beans and peas

Pole beans and peas, tomatoes, cucumbers, and some melons, all benefit from trellising to keep the vines off of the ground. Water on the leaves of these plants is generally a bad idea. Water promotes fungus, bad for plants and definitely bad for the fruits of plants dependent on healthy plants for energy to store. A proper trellising scheme makes harvesting much easier and promotes healthy plants. There are a number of ways to do this well. Most use Bamboo as the basis for good support. If you look at the free section of Craig's List once in a while you will find someone trying to give away Bamboo stakes for free because you cannot mulch it and it is hard to burn.

The Tee-Pee Shape is good for Mounds and for Pots.
The Tent shape is better for rows.

Weaving whips and canes also works very well.

String makes a good trellis material.
But use stuff that will rot away in a year.

Simple stakes with string is wonderfully efficient.
You add more string, higher up the stakes, and the season progresses.

This is wonderful to look at, but hard to harvest in the middle.

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Drying and Canning Beans and Peas for Storage.

Preserving beans for later use is why you do a Victory Garden. Eating well in Winter is your goal. Dehydrating or preserving beans in glass jars is how this is done. 

I am not an expert in canning beans. I do know that you will need a pressure canner to do the job, but search around find better sources of information before attempting to do this. Improperly canned foods can make you sick or kill you outright.

Dehydrating can be done safely in a few different ways.  It is relatively easy to do also, since beans and peas are fairly low water content. Nature's plan was always to allow beans and peas to dry on the vine in late Summer so that they are hardened against the Winter. When Spring arrives, the beans which have fallen from the dry pods to the ground can sprout into new plants. This natural means of preserving beans and peas is why dehydrating is the preferred means of bringing Summer crops to Winter plates.

It is all so easy to do. 

1. Harvest you pods and let them sit out in a cool dry place for a day or so.
2. Open the pods and push the beans out into a clean bowl and leave them on the counter in your house for two weeks, stirring the bowl daily.
3. Put the beans into paper lunch sacks, or roll them up in newspaper and close them up with tape. Paper sacks release any residual water into the atmosphere while protecting from other spoilage.

That is all there is to it. When needed you can simply re-hydrate them in about and hour of cooking in a pot with water or broth, or in a pot without cooking by soaking your beans overnight in water. 

Beans provide a good source of proteins which can last for years when dried and kept dry. A wonderful component of the Victory Garden that will feed you and your family well no matter the conditions in the outside world. Beans and Potatoes are two of the three things a body can easily use to sustain itself. Neither are expensive at the grocery store, but you can't always count on outside suppliers  for quality, or local economies for the cash needed to buy things. In tough times, it is better to grow your beans and potatoes, and save the cash for new shoes.

Revisiting the Victory Garden : Potatoes

   What happens when the food supply chain slows to a crawl? What happens when the money supply tightens up by under-employment and food is plentiful, but cash is not? Americans are not accustomed to thinking this way and those who do think this way are considered a bit weird.

   If you know the history, the Great Depression of 1929 came along like a runaway train that took two years to finish its ruinous run. The depression broke most national supply chains, removed most of the cash from the local economy, and forced many people from their homes. People got through it, but the going was hard . Those stronger American people soon faced a World War well prepared for deprivation and sacrifice.

   In the worst case, the coming of the COVID19 pandemic may well become Americans facing a similar economic disaster as in the 1930s, this time with worldwide supply chain disruptions (coming without national or local substitutes), and all that may come with it. The possibility of a completely broken economy makes for a good opportunity to revisit the idea of the Victory Garden.

   I can't write one simple article describing the Victory Garden and how it works. But whether you are in an apartment or have a few acres, you ought to be thinking about growing some food. When it comes to super cheap foods, things that are easy to plant, grow without tending, and have dozens of ways to prepare, it is hard to do better than to plant potatoes.  Most people simply don't think about this simple thing.

   Many people have something of a garden, well tended or not. Some intrepid city people have a garden patch. The central production of most gardens is the tomato, a few cucumbers, some zucchini, maybe some corn if space permits it. And most are very happy to get a few side dishes out of all the work and expense. Gardening work is mostly recreational, not nutritional. Something of a luxury. When times get tough, the gardens they make are usually our of season. The Victory Garden is different. It products food the whole year around. It encourages canning of seasonal things for use in Winter and produces storage items that last well out of the season when they are produced. The chief difference between a home vegetable garden and a Victory Garden is the idea that you can produce a year's supply of some foods using just a few hours of time, a few times a year.

   Potatoes don't care if you weed them or not. The plants will grow in terrible soil too They need no fertilizer, water, or pesticides and the results can still be very good. Potatoes and onions are about as simple as growing marijuana plants. They come up and do the job. If you want a better "pot", or "spud", you do a little bit more and you get a little bit better. But both plants are pretty low effort.

   In the comments section following this introduction you will find a number of different ways to do the work of growing potatoes. I will also show you how to put onions in with them and double your pleasure.  So read on and get going with growing potatoes. It will be good for your health, if not your wealth.

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   The basic set of information you need to know, so that you can successfully grow a bag of potatoes for next Winter is small and usually pretty fool proof.

1. The first truth about growing potatoes is that there a gardening snobs out there who will tell you all sorts of things which are academically true, but not required to succeed at some level. You needn't be academically correct, just correct enough to get things growing.
2. The second truth about growing potatoes is that if you make a hole in something resembling the ground, put a Seed Potato into the hole and cover it up, you will probably get more potato out of the hole than you put into it. It's really just this simple.
3. The third truth is that nearly every potato on earth is a "clone" of some other potato. It came directly from an ancestor of the potato and not a seed.  There are "Potato Seeds", but most potatoes are grown from "Seed Potatoes" and there is a difference.

   These three truths are self evident and need no other explanation. No matter how bad you are at gardening, no matter how bad the soil, you will likely have some measure of success if you follow just a few rules about "Seed Potatoes".

1. The first rule is that not all "cloned" potatoes grow new potato plants. The big growers you find producing for grocery stores often spray them with a solution which stops "eye" development.  "Eyes" are new potato plants and you need viable eyes to make new plants. Look into farmer's markets and organic section of the grocery store to find spuds that haven't been told not to grow. 
2. The second rule is that any potato "eye" is an individual plant, so one old potato in your pantry may have eight or more new plants looking for dirt to grow in.
3. The third rule is that once you have grown one of the "eyes" to maturity you will find in the harvest some potatoes which are too small to eat. These will be seed potatoes in next year's garden. 

   If all you do is take these truths and find some Seed Potatoes, then put them into dirt, you will probably succeed is growing more potatoes than you planted. You can end your reading here ,or you can keep going. I promise that if you take the time to finish this article, you will find a means of doing very well at this.

How potatoes grow is really simple.

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The Dirt and the Light.

   The chief difference between growing some potatoes, and growing a large amount of them is the dirt and the light. There is a large body of science out there, but for the most part you can forego most of it in favor of this simple string of ideas: Potato plants store energy derived from converting water into basic sugars which are stored up in new potatoes for making more potato plants next year. Potatoes store their own food source much the same as eggs tore what baby birds need to grow until hatching. Sunshine provides the energy to allow the plant to take the water in and process it into new potatoes. If you give the potato plant soil, you get a good enough harvest. No more science is needed.

The fruit of the Potato plant is not very nutritious, it is merely an energy reserve consisting mostly of sugars. So any soil nutrients are mainly used by the plant to make roots, stems, and leaves which produce new potatoes. More roots, stems, and leaves usually increase the amount and size of the potato fruits coming out of the ground. This means that putting a bunch of fertilizer on the plants  may not increase your harvest. Putting the spuds in the right soil is the real key to bigger harvests.

The number of potatoes you will pull out of the ground can be enormous, but the size of each potato is more a matter of time and type of seed potato you plant. If you like cute little potatoes you can dig nearly any of them up in July and they will be small. If you like them bigger you can leave them in the ground until November.  But if you want a really large baking potato sitting next to your steak (or whatever) then it will be the type of potato you plant that gets you what you want. No matter the type of spud you want to get out of the dirt, it is the dirt which you need to make it all come together. And dirt is very simple.

Whatever dirt you have, there are three things in it which make it suitable for growing things.

1. There is clay which soaks up and releases water. No matter your dirt, you have enough clay. But clay is not at all necessary for growing potatoes. (I'll explain this later.) 
2. There is usually sand in your dirt. These are little pieces of decomposed rock which breaks up the clay and allows roots to develop in the air gaps that exist around each individual grain of sand. If you have clay soils more suitable for pottery than growing things you might want to add some sand. If you want to add sand, make sure it isn't "beach" sand you get at the hardware or home improvement store because it comes with salt from the ocean and salt is bad for plants. If you have any question about whether there is salt in the sand you bought, simply rinse the sand out with clear water and this ought to take care of it.
3. There is usually some sort of plant material in dirt which rots away and leaves space for air and releasing nutrients and water. There simply is no way to have too much organic material in the mix. You can grow potatoes in a mix of one-hundred percent organic material and it works very well so long as the material is in the process of rotting.

All three of these components is important. The right proportion of the three means the difference between happiness and joyfulness when it comes time to dig up the harvest. To test the soil contents you simply take a glass jar and put a sample of your dirt into it, then fill the jar with water and stir it around until it is dissolved. Wait a while and any sand will settle to the bottom, the organic stuff to the top, the rest is clay dissolved in muddy water. What you want is a mix  of something which has  under fifty percent clay, enough sand to keep the clay from hardening as it dries, and a lot of organic material. But don't be too fussy about it.

The light the plant receives is definitely more important than the soils you plant in. Potatoes love the light. So spacing your plants properly, and putting them where the sunshine is, is probably the most important thing you will need to do if you want better results. A bit down the page from this are a few different ways to plant, but all of them will need you to space your plants at least eighteen inches apart (the size of an adult plant) and in as much sun as you have. Potatoes grow in shade, but better in the light.

Plant anatomy.
The young tuber is Seed Potato for next year

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Picking your Seed Potatoes.

You can find Seed Potatoes nearly everywhere you can buy potatoes. So long as they can develop "eyes" they will grow into potato plants. In late Winter many grocery stores sell Seed Potatoes.  Plant and farm stores often sell these same seed potatoes, as do home and garden centers. But it is also possible to buy suitable spuds at farmers markets and the organic produce bins at most grocery stores. You should bear in mind that many large producers of potatoes spray them with a hormone which retards "eye" development, making them more suitable for the plate than the garden. You might also have a friend or acquaintance who has some left overs from their own garden. Seed Potatoes are everywhere if you are looking for them. But not all potatoes are the same and I encourage you to try them all. Here are a few that we grow in Zone 8, but nearly all potatoes will grow in all zones.

The Russet Burbank is the potato most people think of when thinking Idaho Spud. A dull brown, rough, large-ish, baker which was once the main stay of potatoes in America. It is clunky and hard to find seed potato since it is usually grown by large commercial growers. It is a good, cheap, potato thing. If you go past the idea of growing it your world will open up the better flavors and textures.

The Pontiac Red (Baby Red) is what most people think of as an up-scale restaurant potato. These are much more common today than in the last century. It is smooth and creamy, but shares the Burbank flavor profile.

The Purple Viking is a newer addition to the line up of what's good out there. It has a purple skin, but a white flesh which is wonderfully suitable for mashing. The flavor is wonderful, the texture a bit grainy when over-cooked. It doesn't make a great fried potato, but so what, grow another variety and fry it. Not really a baking potato.

The German Butterball is the best thing to replace the Burbank in our garden. It can get quite large, so makes a great baking potato. It has a wonderful flavor profile depending on preparation. It fries, boils, and bakes. My favorite overall potato.

The Yukon Gold is often thought of as extra fancy, but the flavor is striking and so it make an okay fry, but a bad baker. Boiling does this variety no good at all since it easily overcooks and can become mushy. I've never grown one.

Another great variety is the Kennebec. The best tasting masher out there. Pure white flesh which doesn't easily become grainy in cooking.  A distinctive flavor and a good range of sizes when harvested.  This one is recommended.

There are a great many choices out there to try. My advice is to try them all and find what suits you best. For us it is the Butterball for general use as fries or bakers, the Pontiac for early harvest boiling and soups, and the Kennebec for mashing. But we try them all and trade seed potatoes with our friends. There are an infinite number of types, colors, and shapes. Try all of them.

These are the types available in Peru.
I'm told that, if you grow from potato seed, you'll get one of these varieties.

The varieties we grow are not so adventurous.
They are all from seed potatoes.

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Raised beds make for great ground if you wish
to make new soils, but potatoes aren't very picky. 

The many ways to plant potatoes

So long as the plant gets some place to put down fully covered roots you will get potatoes. In this part I'll look at just a few, but it is not hard to think of others. . .

The first is row planting in dirt. Dig, mound up the dirt into rows about ten inches deep, and plant eighteen inches apart. Or you can plant in round mounds with onions and corn. Squash works well too. The plants grow together very well.

If your soil is deep, trenching is enough.
We often use a bulb planter to put them in.
This guy likes a lot of space between plants.

Single raised rows is better for
digging when the soils are shallow.

Weeding a potato row really isn't much of a problem since potatoes usually choke off the light available for weeds and use nitrogen available for leaf growth. Potatoes need some nitrogen, but only on the surface, so mulching with straw acts to add some slow release nitrogen while blocking off light to weed seeds. Weeding between rows is a good idea. Potato plants stay of a certain size and are distinctive from other plants.

Messy or not.
Potatoes don't care.

A modified Ruth Stout tower

The Ruth Stout Method uses no digging, and  no dirt. You simply put down a weed barrier (some use old cardboard), distribute about eight inches of straw on the barrier in late Fall to Winter over and decompose a bit, then plant under the straw in early Spring and cover with a fresh layer of straw. You have to plan for this, but you don't even water the plants since the old straw carries the water to the roots. There are a great many ways to do this and we are trying a few of them this year.

No dig potatoes sound sexy.

 The Ruth Stout method is also called "deep mulching" since you renew the straw every year and the underlying layers mulch down. Nine years of layering hay would give you a very deep mulch suitable for many other types of plants as well.

There are many types of containers you can grow potatoes in. Anything from a feed sack to a bucket especially built for the task will work quite well. Just make sure that excess water drains away and the potato fruits themselves see no sunlight at all. Green potatoes are those which have seen sunlight. They are not suitable for eating. If you find a green potato, cover it with mulch and the green may fade away. 

This is a type of bucket where you can harvest any time you wish.

There are a lot of ready made bucket styles, some allow for harvest without disturbing the roots.

And bags work well too. Some use old feed sacks, some use pant legs of old blue jeans tied off at the bottom. Literally any planter will do. So creativity abounds.

So long as the soils are drained of excess water, potatoes will grow.

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Harvesting and storage

If your soils are sufficiently sandy, or the rains not too heavy, you might over-Winter the fruit in the ground where they grew and harvest them when you want to use them. These fruits will grow in the Spring and become a riot of bad gardening so get them all out before the late Winter. But you can do it this way should you want.

Harvesting potatoes takes no special tools, nothing tricky in method. You dig under the plant, sift through the dirt carefully for potato fruits, and let them sit in between the rows for a day to allow the skins to dry. If you planted them in any particular order, sorting them out is unnecessary. You can sort them for size if you wish. We usually sort out next year's seed potatoes before storage and put them in paper sacks marked with their variety to make planting rows easier in Spring. Try to get all of the fruits out of the dirt or you'll have volunteers sprouting everywhere next Spring.

Storing potatoes is simply a matter of keeping them cool and dry. Don't wash them until you are ready to use them. This keep the interior moist and the exterior dry and doesn't promote early growth. We put them in open buckets and out in the shed where rodents can't get to them. You might put them in paper sacks or plastic trays, but refrigeration isn't necessary. Avoid plastic bags or sealing the potatoes away from fresh air circulation. When dried after harvest they should last the Winter and Spring. In Spring we bring the seed potato sacks into the house so that they can warm and develop eyes. The rest are destined for the kitchen and, so long as they are kept cool, dry, and in darkness, will be usable the rest of the year.