Potato Admiration

I was reading ATW's post about how he and his wife are having an herb contest and I can so relate! My husband and I disagree on just about everything (when they say opposties attract, we took it to the EXTREME). Usually with us, the person with more experience gets his/her way... not so with the garden.






Take the above photo. It is of my good neighbor's potato patch. See how close the rows are? See how close the plants are? SIGH. THAT's how I wanted MY potatoes to be planted. Why? Well, it works for my neighbor and it's space saving.



This photo is of 1/2 of our potato area. See all the missing holes? Complete missing rows ~ okay you don't know what's missing, but I do! I told my husband that we should plant like good neighbor, but noooooooo... we have to do it well spaced out. So, now? Now we get to double the size of our garden because we're out of room. (And, if you're wondering why I didn't plant the potatoes myself, well, we were working "together" that day and I let him have his way.)
It's somewhat hard to see, but Jerry is scalping the lawn about 15 feet out from the current garden. This will give us roughly 35' x 75' plus several raised beds that are in another part of the yard. I had wanted to enlarge it last fall, but it didn't happen - we were debating the merits of enlarging it... suffice to say, he came to my conclusion. *ahem*



Since you're here touring, let me show you what's growing...




See all the greenery in the rows between the raised beds? Can you guess what they are? If you said potatoes, you are the Winner! Winner! Chicken Dinner! (what does that mean, anyway? lol) When you don't harvest 100%, the ones left in the ground will grow the next spring. So, we have about 25 bonus plants growing in all kinds of odd places. If they survive the traffic patterns, we'll harvest them too.

Raspberry bushes are looking quite flush. Only 1 failed to sprout so back it goes for an exchange.

Broiler chickens are huddled together in the revised chicken tractor. It's chilly and drizzly today, but they are fully feathered so should be okay. At night, their tractor is covered and stays very warm. I only wish we knew how old they were - we bought them from Atwoods & all they could tell us was they were between 1 - 4 weeks old. So, they are now somewhere between 5 -8 weeks. We plan to butcher around Memorial Day weekend.

Strawberry beds are not as assalted with the poultry netting on, but the Chickens still get in and create havoc. We'll be ordering the electric poultry fencing. We'll either put it around the garden to keep the girls out or create a run to keep them in. It's being debated. :D
Speaking of keeping things out, I don't know if I shared a photo of the rhubarb rescue Jerry built. It has worked great at keeping the horses from eating the stalks to the ground. They keep trying, but they can't quite reach the edge to pull it over. Ha ha ha ~ foiled you!