Peas on St. Patty's Day

Back in my oldest memories is the line "Plant peas on St. Patty's day." I'm not Irish, my background is German and English, so it makes perfect sense to me to celebrate a holiday by planting a food that will be a spring staple from the garden.

Everything grows well in Arkansas, but having to weed the
blueberries on March 18 seems a bit extreme.

This summer I seem to be playing with garden forms. I'm still building the hugelkulture pile with logs from Foxbriar, punky unusable sticks from broom stick hunting, trimmings from trees, soil from drainage trenches we are digging and compost from the kitchen. I'm making a keyhole garden outside the backdoor where I can dump most of my compostables. And I decided to try planting potato cages. I have no idea whether or not these will work, so don't follow the process, unless you want to experiment on your own. I will take pictures and keep following their progress here this summer.

All the blueberries are now weeded and re-mulched.

I'm still a Sunday gardener, so I can't get more done than I can create in a Sunday afternoon, but it sure feels good to play in the dirt. I do have time to weed, water and work with things when I go out and harvest for dinner each night.

Gardening is good!

It was a rock cage, now it is a potato cage.
 It's about 4-ft. in diameter.

Set where the old mulch pile was and then lined with belly
fleece, to keep the dirt in and the bugs out. Filled with
about 6 inches of dirt from the drainage ditches I am
trying to create.

Yukon Gold seed potatoes from North Arkansas Farm Supply.
I cut them so that there was one active eye per chunk.
This is three pounds.

Cut potatoes and scattered on top of dirt.

Another six inches of dirt on top of the potatoes. As they
continue to grow, we'll add another six inches of dirt
and then another six inches. I've heard that you can add
up to 18 more inches of dirt to encourage more potatoes.
We'll see if it works.

Then I planted sugar snap peas, also from Co-op,
all around the outside of the potato cage.
 I planted them one inch apart and covered
them over about one inch with ver.y wet ditch dirt

The rainbow chard bed kept us in greens all winter.
 Looks like dinner tonight.