Planting the red potatoes

Hello, steemians, and welcome to my garden, eh!

I finally got my first batch of potatoes planted yesterday. I've been wanting to get them in for a week now, but I needed to prepare the garden bed first, I finally got that done.

I've tried different ways of planting potatoes over the years, and the method that I've settled on over the past few years is to plant them shallow, and hill up the plants as they grow. They require a bit more watering that way because of the shallow planting evaporating more quickly, but they are a lot easier to dig in the fall. Digging them out is the hardest part about potatoes, and with my bad back, it gets more important to take that into consideration when planting them. To plant them, I dig a shallow trench with the hard tooth rake, and place the chunk of seed potato in the trench about 16 or so inches apart, and then rake the dirt back into the trench to cover the potatoes. I generally only cover them about an inch or so deep. I won't start hilling the plants until they're at least 6 inches up out of the dirt. I'm sure I'll cover that in a later post.
So, let's take a look at how I do this planting thing. Here's the trenches dug. The boards are for walking on without compacting the dirt. They stay in place for the season.

The trenches look deeper than they are because of the dirt piled up next to them.
Putting the chunks of potato in the trenches. Most of these seed potatoes were just cut in half, they were small, and I had to make sure that there were several eyes on each chunk. I sprinkled some water in the trenches before I set the potatoes in, I don't think it's necessary most of the time, but it's been pretty dry here for the past couple of weeks. The rain has been missing this area as it blows through.

The potatoes are covered up with dirt, and the planting is done. There's a bit of a hump covering the potatoes on the near end of the garden bed because of the slope of the bed, and my wanting to plant the tatoes fairly level. I'll be bringing in more dirt in the near future to try to level out the end of the bed a bit more.

Once they start to grow, I'll have to water them more often if it doesn't rain. I don't expect to see much signs of growth for at least a week, I've had potatoes take a couple of weeks to poke above the ground in past years. It all depends on how fast the eyes develop.
I also planted a row of black sunflower seeds along the edge of the bed closest to the sidewalk. The birds really like them when the seeds get mature on the flowers, and of course, they decorate the place too.

Well, that's all I have for this post, I hope you found it interesting!

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