Rain, rain, and more rain—I want to plant potatoes!

The title says it all!!

Anyone else in this predicament?  I have a nice, fertile garden bed, lots of seed potatoes, woodchips to mulch over them and I am absolutely itching to plant.  But I can scarcely get to my garden do to constant, none stop rain.  I believe we have had 2 inches today on top of already soaking ground.

I would just love to get going outside but weather is not cooperating.

Anyone else in this predicament?

Eric

I generally look at the planting window,  then look at the 2 week weather report,  then plant prior to a rain event. I think everyone has experienced "too wet to plant" regardless of planning though.

My catastrophe with potatos has come on the backside. 6 weeks of swamp conditions toward the middle of their cycle. The new potatos rotted in the ground. After 2 years of this i set up raised beds and things have been good.

Thanks Wayne,

My bed is raised, I am just in disbelief as to how much torrential rain we have had.

Today is cloudy but windy and things are drying a little bit, but then again we were pounded with at least 2” of rain last night.

Since my bed is raised and consists of decomposed woodchips. I have half a mind to just set some potatoes on the surface and then bury them under a fresh layer of woodchips.  Has anyone tried this technique?  Does it work?

Thanks in advance,

Eric

Eric Hanson wrote:
Anyone else in this predicament?

Me! Man it's coming down in buckets outside right now, has been most of the day so far at almost 2pm as I write this. I dumped 3 inches of rain out of my rain gauge earlier this week, which was a multi day accumulation. There was a break in the rain this morning and I ran out and sowed some beet and carrot seeds as part of my continuing early sowing experiment in the mildest winter I can remember. An example of part of my experiment is I sowed bush peas, in January. I've never done that before. The days have been short, but they're up, maybe 2 inches tall and growing. I do not have any row covers on anything. I sowed some other cool weather things like spinach and some brassicas, some of which got nipped and died when it got down to 20 one night in february, but a couple others seem to have survived though don't look great. If any of those make it, I'm letting them go to seed so I can save those freeze tolerant genes. I do have pepper, eggplant and tomato seeds started in cell trays which helps soothe my nagging desire to get outside and garden. It's still a little early and odds are good to get a frost here, but this may be one of those years where our last freeze comes six weeks early compared to the almanac date of April 15th for my region. It happened before some years back.  

lots of rain here too, yesterday nice sunny drying day, last night about 1/2" and still raining. good day for indoor duties

James,

You are not far from me so I am pretty sure we have been getting the same weather pattern—which of course means rain!

I am almost about to plop my spuds right down on top of the soil surface and liberally cover in a thick layer of woodchips.  I have plenty of woodchips.  I have heard of something similar being done with straw.  What do you think about the woodchips?

Hang in there just a little bit longer, the warmer temperatures have to be coming soon.

We are pretty much in this together.

Eric

Eric Hanson wrote:  What do you think about the woodchips?

I think it'll work. I'll be doing the same thing and I was inspired by Traces' cool thread about growing potatoes in wood chips found here: https://permies.com/t/119610/Potatoes-wood-chips

I don't have much of a choice right now since being on my new farm I don't have fluffy tilthy earthy smell good soil from years of soil building to go plant in. I had some varied success and failure planting in fresh chips last year, and this year I will have both 1 year old chips and new chips to grow my garden in. It will be propped up and maintained by regular applications of fish & kelp and microbes again like I did last year. I do have a little aged compost I can sift and make some tea with which will help greatly. To my delight, the 1 year old chips are almost completely grown through with threads of white fungal growth.

Thanks for the info James!

The garden bed is my mushroom bed that worked so well last year growing summer squash.  I think if I can get just a little bit of drying out I can get the potatoes started.

Actually plopping the seed potatoes and covering with additional woodchips might not only be good for growing potatoes, it might just be great for the bedding compost itself.  This bed was inoculated about 2 years ago, really decomposed during the first year, and produced mushrooms. The bed could use more wood chips, both to top off the height (trying to keep the bed 12” thick) and to give the remaining spawn more wood to digest and turn into mushrooms and more bedding.

With a little luck and drying weather I will get some taters started in a day or two.

Thanks again,

Eric

Well I will start with the good news first.  We have had about 2 days in a row without tons of rain and some wind to help dry things out.

Then today something really strange happened.  The clouds actually partially cleared from overhead and the sky turned from gray to blue—strange indeed.  Even weirder, I spotted a bright, yellow, glowing orb against the strangely blue sky.  Not only did this orb give off a bright yellow light, it even radiated heat!  I think our distant ancestors called this phenomenon sunlight.

More seriously though, if weather holds out tomorrow I will start to plant potatoes by laying spuds on the surface and then covering with a deep layer of woodchips.

Eric

mud mud and more mud but all things must pass, soon I hope

In general it looks like i beat the rain and things are thriving. I went to tie tomato plants to their stakes and i have actual tomatos on the vine. I've never had them on the vine while i am harvesting asparagus. That is super super early. Potatos are up 4 to 6 inches.

Similar moisture problem here, sort of:

Snowbanks, snowbanks, snowbanks! I want to plant potatoes!

Maybe later in April ... . Or in a plant pot by a window.

They are finally planted, at least some.

We have had about 1/3 of our potatoes planted by now, all the red ones.  We had an almost 3 day break in weather and the ground dried a little so I decided to get things done while the weather cooperated.  My daughter helped me put the potatoes in rows in my raised bed.  Nice thing about the raised bed is that I can use all the bed space and not need to leave any space to walk in.  

At any rate we placed all the potatoes in rows, brought over mulch from the nearby small mountain left over from chipping and laid down an approximately 1 foot thick layer of chips.  I am pretty certain that the chips will settle and I will need to get more as they require hilling, but I have plenty of chips left and I can do that at my leisure.  I don’t think I have ever planted potatoes this deep before, but I don’t expect any problems.  Last year when I planted in chips, the plants pulled out easily and the potatoes were incredibly clean.

Eric

HI ERIC

Three days ago I had 4 inches of standing water between my raised beds in some parts of my garden.  I have two 4x8 beds planted.  I hope to get a third bed of potatoes in today. My beds are 2 ft high.

John,

2’ certainly is a nice, tall bed that can get out of the rain!  Mine started out at about 1’, but are now down to 6” due to the chips composting away on me.  Putting on another 1’ is intended not only to get good cover on the potatoes, but to also get back a nice, tall bed again.

I am sure that with a 2’ tall bed that you will have no problem at all with your potatoes.

Eric

Hi Eric

I have been building these beds for a couple of decades.  I was hoping they would get this tall as I aged....less bending.  For me they are about at knee level.  I doubt if I will take them much higher.  Oh yea, I got the last bed of potatoes in.

John,

Right now 2 of my 3 raised beds have 2x10 raised edges.  The third has extremely rotten logs as edges—they were once about a foot in diameter, now 6-8”.

Next year all beds will have 2x10 edges and in the future I would like to double stack the 2x10 lumber to get close to 2’ tall edges.

But that is for the future someday.

Eric