[thumb:549:l] It’s a bit of an overcast day today. It looks like the Sun wants to come out but just can’t quite manage it. The plants are all doing well at the moment. Everything is taking off.
[newline]
[thumb:548:l] Our experiment with growing potatoes in cages filled with straw is progressing well, it seems. We tried a couple different methods of wrapping the cage with row covers but that didn’t work. The covers kept coming loose. It also seemed like the covers would let through too much light. We don’t want to end up with green potatoes. Instead we’ve switched to using cardboard. The Red Norland potatoes were first up and have grown quite a lot in the box. We’ll have to add another tier soon. The Chiefton potatoes next to them came up last so there’s quite a contrast between them at the moment.
[newline]
[thumb:547:l] The next container over has our peanuts. Actually it has peanuts that I just planted today and peanut fingerling potatoes. I don’t know if the peanuts will do well or not. They need a long growing season and I’m not sure how well they’ll work in a container. I like peanuts, though, so we’ll see. In this case we just picked up a few raw peanuts at the store. They may not even come up if they’ve been treated with something. The beans I grew from store beans worked okay.
[newline]
[thumb:546:l] Our garlic looks good. In a couple weeks maybe we’ll stop watering it and hopefully it will be ready to harvest about the time our squash need to be transplanted. I have some more cages that I’m going to try using to keep the squash a little more contained this year. Our porch garden is certainly going vertical this year!
[newline]
[thumb:550:l] Back in the corner the plants are all doing well. I cut back the kale yesterday and had some fresh kale on my sandwich today. The Irish Cobbler potatoes will be the next potatoes to go into a box. Probably in the next few days I’ll get the box set up and start adding straw.
[newline]
[thumb:551:l] On the back side of the porch we have the smaller containers. In the wagon we have two long containers with alpine strawberries growing and a smaller container. The bigger round containers have marigolds. Beside the wagon there are nasturtiums and (not up yet) basil and oregano.
