We Made Do and the Potatoes and Onions Are In

…The ground that is,  the nice moist soil in the raised beds not the muck and mire.

For the theme, “Make Do”, my header shows that sometimes you can’t always plant the whole bed like you planned, sometimes you just have to “Make Do”.

Dirt and I got back from visiting up north and seeing Anna’s little bunnies…

Only to find out that Bet let it rain while we were gone.  Oh well, the theme is make do and so we shall.

The onion beds are well out of the low area, the potatoes aren’t so lucky.  And because the onion plants arrived as we were headed out the driveway, we tackled the onion beds first.

They were a dream to get ready, not very weedy because the beds had been well prepped last fall,

so a quick weeding..(that’s Dirt’s behind not mine)…

Some raking,

Then stamping in the planting holes with my groovy planting tool

and the onions go in.  Not too deep, ’bout an inch, they like to stay right on the surface of the soil.

I ordered onion plants from Dixondale in Texas, not as cheap as seed of course but not the big fat hassle either, sometimes it pays to pay. 

Not to mention, Dixondale says that each bundle has approximately sixty plants, boy howdy several of them had nearly twice that.  I’m a pleased customer for sure.

I may get back to my practice of planting onion seeds directly in the fall and in flats in early winter but for now, I sorta like this method.

On Wednesday, tomorrow, I’ll bring out some plastic garbage cans, maybe just one for now, set them by the onion patch, fill them a third of the way with fresh horse manure, just the nice fresh “pasture apples” (we have a bit close by) and then nearly fill with water, gathered from the pasture puddles, let it sit for a day.

On Friday I’ll siphon off the liquid, put it in a sprayer and spray the onion plants in the morning.  Replenishing the water and manure as needed and repeat each week.  Onions are heavy feeders, they like a lot of nitrogen, some weeks I’ll add some extras like Magnesium Sulfate (Epsom Salts) or Sea-90 into the liquid in the sprayer. 

When the manure solids get high and are lookin’ depleted, instead of putting more manure and water in the big bucket, I’ll scoop the slurry out and use it in and around other plants, especially light nitrogen users

I’ll tell you all about potato plantin’ tomorrow, I wrote it all out but moved it to another draft, too much to read in one day!

The visit with Anna and Justin was wonderful and it was very sweet to get together with our dear friends the Coulters.

Thanks for holdin’ my place in the world Dear Reader, visits are good and necessary to the soul but gettin’ back in the saddle just feels right. It’s where God put me afterall, must be why it always feels so very good. 

For now you might want to wander over to my side board and go see what the others have for my theme pick. “Make Do”.