Growing Taters

Adam's potato-growing experiment was a smashing success! It's so nice here on the farm to finally have a smashing success. We've been a waterlogged soaking mess for so many weeks. Do you recall how he grew his potatoes in a beat-up plastic trash can, buried in his big compost pile? They loved it in there, nice and warm.

The old, soft potatoes he put in there emerged last week bigger and harder. 

But he wasn't interested in them; he was interested in their root systems.

And the straw he kept adding to the trash can had turned into lovely dirt ... see?

It's hard to see this to scale, but those potato roots are about 3 feet long. They filled the trash can. If they'd bloomed and put out tubers, we'd have had LOTS of potatoes in there.

That's Maggie, btw, nosing the dirt. She's over 20 pounds now and has had her shots. She's doing great.
In the spring, Adam will plant more potatoes and we will have lots of them later in the year. He wants to plant specialty fingerling potatoes to sell, but we will eat lots of potatoes too. He's quite excited.

Adam's also been putting in a dog fence so our dogs will stay out of our very-dangerous highway. He ran it along the entire perimeter of the property, mostly along the fence:

the yellow wire

It starts on the side of the garage ...

And runs in a little trench to the corner of the orchard ...

He uses a funny tool to dig the trench for the wire:

This is a lot of property and a lot of wire. He's done this in the past couple of days, the coldest of the year thus far. He's almost done. Brrr. Makes my hands hurt just to think of it.

Some of it he dug into a trench along the road, and he's come across all the driveways now.

This is for Beau and Maggie. Sandy is our intelligent dog who will obediently stay where you tell her to stay. Beau and Maggie are escape artists. After all this work, I hope the electric fence will keep them in. Maggie seems to be oblivious to pain.