Garden Gab

When my parents moved into their first rural home in central Maine, their first priority was starting a vegetable garden.  Like all good adventurers, they plunged into it with plenty of gusto but not very much knowledge.  When it came to planting potatoes, they didn’t even know where to start.  As any humble flatlander (as new arrivals are called in Maine) would do, they asked a farmer friend for help.  With a perfectly straight face and (I’m sure) the friendliest of intentions, these are the steps she told them to take: 

1. First dig a long trench in the garden, rather than poking holes for each plant as you would do with seeds

2. Next, find a potato with lots of green sprouts, called “eyes” and cut the eyes off the potato

3.  Wrap each eye with a little waxed paper

4. Lay them in the trench about 3 inches apart and cover with 1 to 1.5 inches of soil

My parents followed her exact instructions, painstakingly cutting each eye and wrapping it in small pieces of waxed paper before planting them.  When their farmer friend good naturedly asked them how the potato patch was coming along, my father said, “Great, but I just have one question.  What’s the reason for the waxed paper?  We wrapped each one but I’m just curious what it does for the plant.” 

Their farmer friend couldn’t stop laughing.  “You really wrapped each eye in waxed paper?” she asked.  “Yeah,” my dad said, “You told us to, it took us forever.”  His friend was laughing so hard she almost cried.  “You wrap them in wax paper to keep the mud out of their eye!” she laughed. 

So, for those of us, like my parents, that have the best intentions for their gardens but maybe not all the technical abilities necessary, this section of the blog is your friend.  Twitter us, email us, note us your gardening questions, misadventures or crises and we’ll do our best to get you the answers you need.  So you won’t get mud in your eyes.