Taters & Onions

Even though the ground outside right now is practically impossible to even walk on because of the mud, I'm still plowing forward (get it...) with gardening plans. Today I "wintersowed" two spinach varieties and planted a flat of 3 kinds of herbs--lavender, cinnamon basil, and oregano--to join the other stuff growing in my makeshift sunroom, aka the kitchen table.

This past weekend we took a trip to our local farm supply store to check out the seed potatoes and onion sets. This is a dangerous time of year for me because it's hard to be around seeds and plants and not want to bring them home, regardless of the price or current weather conditions.

In all, we ended up with almost 16lbs of seed potatoes. The varieties I chose were Yukon Gold, Red LaSoda, Kennebec White, All Blue, and a few Norland Reds.

 

I'm keeping them in an old apple crate in the garage. There is another layer of potatoes under this one--at this point in the planting game I have no idea how much is too much or too little. I know what we've planned on paper, but it's hard to tell if we are vastly overcompensating for our ridiculously small yields last year (due to not planting enough). I do know that in this family, some roasted potatoes, onions, summer squash, and a little bit of meat go a long way in the summer dinner department. Which is why I may have gone overboard in the onion department, too:

I've never planted onions of any variety before, and although my research tells me that we should be planting intermediate-to-short day varieties in our area, I couldn't determine what varieties were being sold at the farm store. So, I just purchased and hoped for the best. 220 bulbs ought to do it, right? Plus 12 experimental shallot bulbs...the chef wannabe in me couldn't resist grabbing these. Now if only the ground would dry out a bit so I can get cracking!