Potatoes, Asparagus and More!

Potatoes, asparagus, onions, garlic, horseradish, rhubarb...it's all here at The Flower Bin!

Jeanette, the front end manager here at The 'Bin tells us the best way to plant potatoes and asparagus, and we also list the varieties that we carry this year.

Potatoes

Let's break down into quick and easy steps how to plant these garden favorites!

1.  The ground should be warm enough in around a week (end of March) to start planting your potatoes.

2.  Start by cutting the potato into pieces to prepare it for planting.  What you do is cut around every eye.   These are obvious as they are the only green part growing on the potato.  Cut a chunk around every eye.  Each of these will be an individual plant.  Make sure you leave about an inch of potato around the eye that you cut.  The eye needs that extra potato to feed off of until it starts rooting out.

3.  Dig a hole about a foot deep in the ground or in your container.



4.  Place the chunk with the eye on it face up at the bottom of the hole, and cover with just an inch or two of soil.  That eye will start growing upwards creating a stem.  Every time the eye grows an inch or so, cover it up with another inch or two of soil.  Keep doing this until you have reached ground level.  The roots of the potato form from this stem, and in turn give you the potatoes.  That is why you don't want to short yourself as far as depth of the hole you make.

5.  The potato plants produce large green foliage and have purple flowers.  If you want new, or young, potatoes you typically want to dig them up about 6-7 weeks after you have planted them.  If you want full grown potatoes you should wait until after the first frost of the fall.  Once it frosts and the foliage dies and turns brown, that's your signal to dig up those potatoes.

Jeanette's tip is to plant your potatoes in a deep container.  That way at the end of the season you can simply tip the pot over, and out roll your potatoes!

Here are the varieties that we have this year:

Yellow Fin (late season), Cal White (mid season), Rose Finn Apple (mid season), Red Pontiac (early season), Red Lasoda (late season), Norkota (early season), German Butterball (late season), Russian Banana (late season), Kennebec (early season), Kennebec White (mid season), Yukon Gold (early season), Russet Burbank (mid season), Red Norland (early season), All Blue (late season), Viking Purple (early season).

Asparagus

1. Dig a trench in the ground or container
2. Make a small mound of soil at the bottom of the trench.
3. Wrap the roots (they look like a ton of big fingers) around that mound at the bottom of the trench.
4. Bury the finger-like roots all of the way to the top of the crown, where all of those roots join together.
5. Water well!!
6. Don't forget that you can't harvest the first year that you plant asparagus.  Though it might be tempting, you can't harvest until the second season.

Here are the three great types that we have:

Purple Passion (this is the newest variety we carry)
Mary Washington
Jersey Giant



Questions?  Call, stop by, visit our website or message us on Facebook!