Planting Potatoes!

Today was a weird day--my son took his nap too early and so the kids ended up taking naps at different times. My husband ended up napping while our daughters slept so it was just me and the boy...so we had a mother-son outing to our backyard to plant some potatoes.
This is his face when I told him we were going to put pototoes in the ground--he's thinking, "We're going to do what with these???"

here it looks like he's putting it in the ground but really he's stealing it out of the ground! He didn't quite get the concept :)
This is his little shovel that daddy bought him to help shovel horse poo :)


So there they are. I don't even know if I did it right....I hope so. My husband and I were inspired by the book "Farmer Boy" (the Little House series) where they planted potatoes and it's as easy as just planting a potato! They cut the potato up into pieces and just made sure that each peice had an "eye." That sounded so simple! So I did some online research and it sounds about right--plant them 6 inches deep, about a foot apart, little rooty things pointing up (you know when the potato sits in the pantry too long it sprouts little rooty things?). And then cover with soil. I just had to make sure the soil was mixed with mulch because our soil is hard and rocky.

This is what is supposed to happen. Pretty cool from just one potato! I'm waiting until March to plant everything else (because that's what George our goat/chicken neighbor is doing) but I got worried when I read potato plants like cold weather and will die when weather hits 95 degrees....which is pretty common in May so I started planting! The idea is to wait until the last possible frost is gone. We're safe from that now I'm pretty sure.

So we'll see! This is my first time planting anything from scratch so we'll see how it turns out!

Oh and I thought I'd throw in our dinner pictures for today--beans (with garlic cloves) and whole wheat egg bread. Super healthy meal--whole grain and protein and lots of fiber (in both the beans and bread) and the beans have lots of vitamins too--the only thing that would have made it perfect was to throw in a salad.

So I got all my chores done, took care of 3 kids (including nursing one!), made beans, bread, and planted potatoes--today was eventful and productive!