sweet potatoes

here are some of our sweet potato harvest. they were so easy to do and flourished. we'll be allocating a much larger portion of our garden to these little (big) favorites next year.

the black plastic mulch method proved a grand success. all we did was prepare the soil, cover the area with black plastic, cut holes in the plastic (i'll use a plumbing torch next time to burn the holes), plant the slips that tabitha started and nurtured since winter. while we went to st louis the cows broke into the garden and ate most of the leaves from them. they bounced back and made tons of tuber in spite of it all.

the whole house has a snotty cold today. it is not completely debilitating but it just as well should be. all it does is leave just enough energy to make me feel anxious about the stuff i need to get done. i have even started a few things and regretted my lack of concentration and exhaustion afterward.

i went to work today a half day. i brought home some leftover polyethylene tubing.

it is enough to make a small row cover for extended salad season. this stuff is pretty cheap and wouldn't need to be this large in diameter. we might have some more left over after the final project. i imagine that it won't hold up against uv exposure for many seasons but we'll see.

i also need to build tabitha a sewing machine/serger cabinet. mostly i need to lock the kids (toly) from nearly ruining it at every opportunity. i'll try to do that this weekend. another task we'd like to get on this weekend is clean out the green house and plant some more greens in there. we want to start our own onions this year from seed and will have to get the greenhouse going so early that we might never really close it down. i'm going to go look at onion varieties any suggestions? we are considered short-day but on the border and could get away with the right long-day variety on the right year.

the wood stove almost chased us out of the house last night. i enjoyed it since i was sickest and could have enjoyed a native american sweat lodge. i hope this illness passes quickly.