Potatoes! Potatoes! Potatoes!

The facebook groups are full of people asking what they can sow or plant now and the answer to that question has a lot of variables in it. But one thing you can start planting – or getting ready to plant – now is potatoes. Late winter, early spring is a good time to have your seed potatoes sitting in a tray, an egg carton, on a tray lined with straw – in a warm spot to allow the eyes to sprout.   Do this while you prepare your bed.

Everyone should have a row of spuds somewhere in their garden – especially if you are starting out. There is nothing nicer than harvesting and eating a plate of delicious new potatoes – and why not start your own tradition of producing the spuds for Christmas dinner? 

I usually have a whole separate bed for potatoes but have started to put in at least a row into my raised bed – especially for the Christmas dinner crop.  I do find the raised beds produce a nice clean crop of potatoes that are easy to dig out.  You just have to make sure that when you harvest them, that you remove every little tuber – otherwise you end up with spuds sprouting for years afterwards

Preparing the ground.

Potatoes are gross feeders and prefer a slightly more acid soil so don’t add lime.  As this is a root crop, you don’t want too much nitrogen either to avoid too much green growth at the expense of producing your spuds. Add well-rotted compost. If you use animal manures, make sure they are also well rotted as you will get scabby potatoes if the manure is too fresh.  In New Zealand we can buy sheep pellets so that’s a good option. I mix in some blood and bone as well. There are specific potato fertilisers you can use so if you’re not sure, then use them.  

Planting Methods

Traditional Inground Method

If you are planting straight into the soil, then space your holes about 30cm apart and your rows about 60 cms apart.  Bury them about 10cm deep, then mound up the whole row so you can see where they are planted. You can keep mounding up as they sprout to keep the tubers protected from the light and to allow more delicious little tubers to grow. Protect the young shoots from frost by using frost cloth.

Tyre Method

If you don’t have a lot of space you can try planting into tyres. Not everyone has spare tyres lying around but a few kiwi backyards do!  Place one tyre on an area where there is bare soil and plenty of light.  I suggest that you avoid late afternoon sun as you don’t want to precook your potatoes.  It can even be on the edge of the lawn. Add some good soil mixed with compost or potting mix and then plant 3-4 seed potatoes in that layer, making sure they are well covered from the light. Water and leave until sprouted.  Once they have produces leaves, then add the next tyre, fill with soil and carefully press down around the leaves. Aim to leave some green showing.  Then repeat another couple of times depending on how many tyres you have.  When the time comes to harvest, then lift off one tyre at a time and harvest as you go!

Straw Bed Method

For those of you have accidentally grown a great crop of potatoes next to the compost bin or where you have chucked out old potato peelings, you will appreciate this method. It works well too if you are creating a raised bed from your lawn or paddock as it’s a good way of breaking up the ground.  Mow the strip of land you want to use cutting the grass back as low as you can go.  Place your potatoes on the ground, 30 cms apart, then cover with a good heap of stray or even a bale of hay.  This is a form of no-dig gardening. If you happen to be doing this in a paddock, with some strong paddock grasses like couch, or heaven-forbid – kikuyu (my sisters’ north -Auckland gardens) – then an extra layer of cardboard  under the straw would help. The potatoes would still be planted on the soil though.

So hopefully that will get you started for the season.  I”ll talk a little more about what you can sow or plant in early spring in my next post but in the meantime,  get some potatoes in the ground and you will thank yourself when you are eating salads over summer.

Pruning Your Life (Before Life Prunes You)

“Clear space to grow what matters most.”  (Stefanie Gas)

Years ago I read an article in an English Country Living that had quite an effect on me.  It was an article about a Swedish woman, married to an English member of the aristocracy, who went through a marriage breakup and described the experience with these words;  “life pruned me”.  I was very struck by that phrase – possibly because I had gone through a similar thing and felt the harsh cuts and uninvited acts of being forcibly jostled out of a former life. “Being Pruned” was a great way to put it and so this month, as its pruning time in the garden and winter being a time of contemplation, I want to talk about pruning back our lives. This time doing it ourselves and taking the thoughtful and deliberate steps to cut back that which is no longer fruitful and building a strong framework of branches that will in time produce the fruit we are after.

Incidentally, and as a bit of a side note as I know I have a lot of readers who would be interested, Lena ended up with a country house full of traditional furniture.  Do you know what she did? She painted the whole thing.  I loved it because she used all my favourite colours, the blues, greens, greys and whites of the Scandinavian palette and she lightened up and transformed that place. She even painted out the old dressers and brown furniture.  Which turned the house into a gorgeous setting for photo shoots, used by none other than one of my other favourite heroines and style masters, Laura Ashley.   Took a bit of courage to do that but I guess if you have gone through a pruning time – anything is possible!

So lets take a look at our lives now. Who is overwhelmed by too many things, too much to do, too many projects begun but never finished, toxic people, feeling stretched too thin and never seeming to have enough oxygen to breathe into the sort of lives we really want.  That’s what an unpruned bush or tree is like and now is as good a time as any to put some thought into our changing that.  What do we want in our lives and what fruit are we looking for? This is an act of simplifying life.  Getting down to what is important to us in any branch of our life, cutting out what we no longer want, or what’s draining us, pruning back unnecessary stuff so our lives can spring forth into life, and we can start to see over time, the fruits of our labours rather than the round and round sameness of the lives many of us leave.

An unpruned shrub or fruit tree cannot give its best and can end up just dying away after limping along for a few years. What happens is that there can be to much growth and the branches can get tangled together forming a thicket where little light and oxygen can enter.  In some trees, fruit comes on new wood and some on last years wood.  If not pruned, then the branches get longer and longer and the fruit ends up way out on the end of the limbs. Either way the tree is not able to grow to its full potential. It needs some judicious sharp cuts that may seem brutal at first in the cold hard light of winter, but come spring, will burst forth into life and end up a beautiful useful tree.  Sounds good doesn’t it? The good news is that even old trees can be rejuvenated by  little judicious pruning.

Step 1. Decide what sort of fruit you want.  Clarify your vision for your own life – who and where to you want to be in a year’s time, who you want with you, what are your priorities. Get really clear on that so you know what you are pruning for. This will be your guide for knowing what to keep and what to lose– if it lines up with your life goals – then keep it. If it doesn’t cut it off.

Step 2.  The initial aim with pruning is to establish a strong framework.   Now you know where you want to end up, use this to guide you into what branches you want to keep.  So have a branch that represents the physical area of your life,, a business/work one, a people or relationship one, a personal growth one, a spiritual one – you decide what is important to you and create a framework from that.

Step 3. Cut out anything that does not align with your goal or is preventing you from being effective.  Check in the financial area – do you have a leaky bank account?  Is there money going out of your account that shouldn’t be?  Are you distracted by shiny new offers – signing on for too many things,  committees, etc at the expense of what’s important to you? Its good for us to support our communities but its not always the right season – join up later when you have more time but do a bit of deleting now.  Incidentally, when pruning back branches that you no longer want when you are pruning, you have to cut right back to the wood so they do not resprout.

Step 4.  On each of those branches or areas of your life, think about what you really want . The ones you want to keep, prune back to what is effective and what you can manage.  This is for those of you who maybe like me are growing an online business using social media and constantly signing up for the next new course by some bright young thing who has appeared in my feed. My inbox definitely needs pruning with upwards of 20K emails in it.  Trouble is, it’s a form of distraction for me and as part of my own pruning process, I want to cut right back to the essentials of what I need to do to get traction.

 This applies to the people in your life. You significant other and your family should be top of your list for example. And that is relative to what stage you are in life. A young family has different needs to a grown up one so adjust accordingly.  Unfortunately we can often get too busy and neglect those vital relationships.   Apply this principle to each branch you have chosen and deliberately plan what you want to grow – getting rid of what is holding you back.

Step 5.  Part of pruning is also grafting.  What can you graft onto your branches to help you get where you want?  What behaviours do you need to add, what systems or routines can you add?  Do you need to make space for recreation and down time?  Think about it.

Step 6. Practice what I call thought hygiene. Traditionally, when hard cuts have been made to trees, the vulnerable are can be exposed to viruses or diseases, so a salve of some kind is applied to protect the site until the tree can heal the wound. Our unconscious hates change and you may find that all sorts of negative thoughts, fears and doubts can rise up when we make changes – even when they are for good. So be aware of that, thank your old brain for caring but boldly go to where you consciously need to go to live the life you want.

Finally –it may be a bit shocking at first.  Any plant pruned right back for maximum fruit bearing may look like it is never going to recover.  This is where you are going to need some courage and have faith.  Spring will come and the life force will flow through the tree and your freshly pruned life. Stay with it, don’t give up.  Keep nurturing and cherishing yourself as much as you would your favourite rose bush. It’s the way of nature and it applies to you as well

There’s a wise old saying about pruning. What you are aiming for is to clear out the dead wood in the middle of the thicket to enable oxygen to get into the plant and have enough room for a bird to fly through.  We all need oxygen in our lives and we all need space for miracles to show up!  So get pruning!

This has been a bit of a long read but I think is a useful one for so many of you.   I am putting together a workshop on this if any of you are interested - it’s a useful exercise to do at any time of your life. Please email on keren@professionalcountrywoman.com me if you are interested in finding out more.

July:Planning Your New Season’s Vegetable Garden

Today is very cold and wet in the part of the country I live in so I am opting for an indoor day today. The ground is too wet to dig, the paths are too muddy and it’s too cold and miserable to be outside for too long. I’ve been out and fed the chooks making sure I have given them plenty to eat as its miserable for them too. The cat has had her breakfast and we have as well. Today I have the guilt free luxury of getting time to think and write.

A wet winters day is a good time to plan your new season vegetable garden. For me, the winter solstice and the short winter days it brings is the start of a new gardening year. Garlic is symbolic of that first planting to make for the summer harvest. For those of you following my Crop Rotation Poster, it’s the one where I rotate to the next bed. Garlic comes under Group 4, and they now move to the bed where I previously had Group 3 Heat Loving Vegetables. The frost has made sure the previous inhabitants have long gone; the pumpkins stored,tomatoes relished, excess courgettes and corn in the freezer and the bed dug over and made ready for the root crops to follow.

So now I take a look at my own copy of the Crop Rotation Poster and remind myself what goes where. It is a jolly useful tool and if you have’t got one yet then see the link below.

To start you off with your planning here are some of my suggestions.

1.      Plant what you like to eat

2.      Plants you can preserve and store for winter.

3.      Plants that will supplement and extend the family budget.

4.      Match your specific needs.

5.      Plants that bring joy

6.   Make sure the size of the garden matches the size of the time you have available.

1. Plant What You Like To Eat.

   Come up with a list of vegetables you and the family like to eat. There’s no sense in planting vegetables that no one is going to eat.  When the lockdowns were first announced and we were given 2 days to go into hiding, you may remember that all of the garden centres were ransacked for vegetable seedlings – with the notable exception of brussels sprouts. Oh dear. I know lots of people do love them but they are not high on my list of favourites.  So think about what you and your family like and plan to plant those. Don’t forget herbs - there are plenty of easy grow herbs that you will thank yourself for planting when you want to flavour your dinner and need a bit of parsely, sage, rosemary or thyme.

2. Plants You Can Store or Preserve.

A common trap for new gardeners is to sow or plant everything at once and you therefore end up with a summer glut. That means you have 6 cabbages mature all at the same time for example.  However, there are some vegetables that you can grow, eat when they are ready but also store or preserve in some way.   Pumpkin is a great one for this.  They taste better after storing and are very delicious to use for roasts and soups over winter. Beans, courgettes and corn can all be blanched and frozen.  Tomatoes can be made into sauces and bottled or frozen. Most can be made into pickles or relishes for the larder.   So you can never have too many tomatoes in my opinion. Root crops can be stored in a cool place or left in the ground.

3. Plants That Extend the Family Budget

Never think that you have to either be self-sufficient in your backyard vegetable garden or you might as well not bother.  If you are short on time or have minimal space, then think of things that are easy to grow and available when you need it.  Silverbeet, courgette, celery, parsley for example.  You are going to go a long way to helping extend the family budget if you have even a small vegetable patch and can pop down and pick some leaves to go with dinner.  Lettuce is a great example.  They will grow most of the year around and you could easily harvest enough leaves each day for a healthy homegrown salad. Think about how you can supplement the family budget by adding what you have grown. You have the added advantage of the extra health benefits that come from spray free food as well. 

4. Match Your Specific Needs.

Have you heard of the Celery Juice craze? If you follow Tony Robbins or other motivational gurus you’ve probably heard of the Medical Medium who advocates for the health benefits of celery juice.  Now I personally don’t think we need and off-world entity telling us to eat more vegetables – its nothing that our mothers and grandmothers haven’t already told us - but if you do enjoy vegetable juices then plan to plant them in your garden.  Celery can be very expensive out of season – plus it is traditionally one of most highly sprayed of commercial crops. If you are juicing for health, then you are going to want a good source of organic celery. So grow your own. Same for beetroot, kale or the other plants you like to juice.

5. Plant things that bring joy

Don’t just make your vegetable place a prosaic practical business end of the section. Add a few flowers for your own joy, and for all the beneficial insects. Butterflies and bees will love you for it.  So will your children.  If you have children (or grandchildren, or great grandchildren!), then one of the best things you can do for them is make the vegetable garden a happy place to be. I have always grown peas for that very reason.   They are not the best crop really for the home garden because you probably need a few acres to have enough to warrant growing, but if you have toddlers or young ones, nothing beats eating peas straight from the pods.   Let them have their own patches if you can and grow what they want.  I remember having my own childish imagination inspired by the petals of the Iceland poppy – so pop a few of those in for fairy frocks.

6. Match Size of Garden to Time Available.

Finally, you want to make sure you have the time to care for the garden you want to grow. Nothing beats the enthusiasm of the bright new gardener and if you love it you will make the time.  But watch out for making a rod for your own back.  There’s nothing worse than seeing the weeds taking over, the jobs piling up but you are tied up working long hours on your day job.  It can be heartbreaking.  So start with what you can manage and grow from there. There are ways to plan for and manage your time in the garden and I will be writing about that later, so I don’t want to discourage you from starting your garden but just be a little mindful. Your garden should be a place of nourishment for the soul just as much as for the body so make sure you don’t overload yourself.