the potatoes have done well this month...i've already raked some loose soil up around the bases of the plants...but since the weather is about to warm up again and they will be taking off i decided to be proactive and hill them today... i took that bag of straw from last winter's campus mulch that i've had quietly rotting in my yard since march and spread it around the base of each plant and then covered the base of each plant with compost...it will serve a number of purposes... it will stimulate the plants to produce more tubers...since the tubers grow close to the surface and exposure to sulight causes a build-up of alkaloids that "green" the potatoes and can make them unfit to eat it will block the light...it will also help the plants retain mosture and damp down weeds...it took a bout an hour's worth of effort to hill all thrity-nine plants...i will doubtlessly be hilling them again before july...using more compost will help speed up the straw's decomposition and add more organic matter to the bed...after harvest there will be cowpeas followed by winter wheat as a cover crop since i am trying to make my yard as self-sustaining as the garden on campus... i can move outside the narrower parameters of the campus garden back there and experiment with ideas i run across out there on the interweb or in the reading i am still doing...a time-consuming project for my dotage.
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