I did a joint onion plant order to get costs down to a few cents per plant with a friend. Met up with him the other night since he had taken delivery, and he had some extra things for me. I am holding a thin skinned long keeping potato there called Red Cloud. That one was cut into 4 pieces last night and is one of about 100 more potato sets of that type that will go into the ground on Sunday if things go as planned, when we make our first foray to the Ness Farm to get the earliest things in the ground.
He gave me a box of Irish Cobbler potatoes as well. The sprouts on them are large enough that for the time being I do not want to handle or cut them too much before they are planted, so will likely leave them whole for planting. It is raining today and expected to rain tomorrow, so since planting in wet soil, better to not cut just before planting anyway to avoid the seed potatoes rotting out on the cut sides.
That is 800 onion plants. I have a flat of Red Wethersfield in my basement as well. Last year I grew 600, thinking that would be plenty. I was wrong by about 5 months. We ran out a few weeks ago and though we have topsetting onions now, we are sadly bereft of large cooking onions as the last of the long keepers were finished in a venison stir fry a while ago.
Another unexpected thing was begonias, which are on the left hand side of this photo. I have a lot of large pots, and begonias are pretty, so, as long as Patti gets them into the pots before I fill them up with something else, there will be that much more color around the house. On the left is Oronoco and Burley tobacco. Have not seriously grown tobacco in a while, but between those 8 small pots is about 50 plants which will get about 6 feet high, and give more nicotine than anyone needs as well as seed to grow fields in the future. If I had any wish to do so.
There was also a few pots of impatiens already flowering for the girls and all is waiting to go into the ground. Tomorrow I am giving a talk on food freedom at a political convention, but it is supposed to be raining anyway, and Sunday is supposed to get to the low 60s and we have all day to drop things in the ground, so we will see how it goes.
