The colors of the leaves are beginning to turn. Across the street, my neighbor already has quite a few leaves fallen onto his lawn. I think I'll tell him he can give them to me instead of taking them to the trash. If I have energy I might even go over there with the leaf vacuum once there's enough accumulated and just shred them all myself. It'll be good exercise.So I've called the tree trimming company and they will come by with a couple yards of tree mulch when they are in the area. I can't imagine it will take very long, since the main office is about 2 miles from here. Sarah (my sister) said we could use their truck to haul the manure so I'm waiting to hear back from the manure guy on that. It's up north a bit, but we're already going up that way on Sunday with my sister and her family to pick pumpkins. I can't wait to get sugar pumpkins processed - pumpkin bread is one of my absolute favorite things of the season.
Today I didn't do much outside, it's REALLY windy out! Nice and sunny, but only in the 50's. Eleora and I went outside for a bit, I took inventory of the cedar boards I have left and decided I could do one more potato box is I only build them 2 feet high. I guess I should figure out if I'll get a better yield if I have 2 boxes that are 3 or 4 feet high, vs. 3 boxes that are 2 feet high.
On the bottom right you can see one of the potato boxes. They are 2.5' square, and 1 foot high right now. Basically, I'll fill them to 6 inches deep, plant my potatoes, and then fill them with straw, leaf mold, or whatever mulch I have on hand as the plant grows up. The basic idea is that you continue to pile up more and more, forcing the plant to continue to grow taller... and more space between the actual root and the plant means more potato growing space. We'll see how it works. My plan is to take the remaining boards that I have and screw them into a square so I can just set them on top. They will stay in place because of those wooden stakes, and I'll probably have to add more, but we'll see how it goes. So I am not sure how I should do it. I suppose that since I'm a novice at growing potatoes, the more potato plants I have the better luck, right? So I could make another potato box and then have 3 of them. I'll have to research it a bit.I feel strangely on edge with no pressing project. Weird!
Anyway so we got a little bit of the area cleaned up, we did get rain last night so the cardboard is nice and soggy, waiting for the tree mulch :) Eleora and I took the rest of the boards and put them into the garage since I probably won't need them until springtime. (except what I needed to make one more box, just in case). She's such a great helper! Sometimes, at least ;)
