This was an early day for me- I wanted to get everything in so I’d have some time to see what took.
Not that I’ll know if the potatoes are duds in a day- more like several weeks to know if they’ll sprout or not.
The cauliflower are a different story.
These were the sets I bought yesterday- just your garden variety 6 pack, except that several of the cells held doubles. That’s always a problem as you have a choice- do you separate them to get more potential plants? Do you just kill the weakest and plant only 6? Or do you not separate them and get stunted plants?
I opted to separate them for maximum cauliflower. Which may not have worked out so great.
Some of them are really perky!
Some of them are runty and wilty. It’s only been half a day since I planted them- I won’t know for a few days who will live and who will die.
But I decided to take out an insurance policy.
A while ago I ordered these great terra-cotta watering spikes. The idea is that you put a bunch of water in a wine bottle and stick the spike on top. Then you invert it and stick it deep in the soil. As the soil dries out it draws the water from the bottle out of the permeable terra-cotta.
Since we’ve had so much sun and warmth the bed I just planted might get dry so I put the first wine-spike there first.
Maybe it will rejuvenate those wilting cauliflower.
Maybe I’ll need to buy more cauliflower sets next week.
Who knows.
Sorry got morbid there for a minute. On to the potatoes!
These are fancy actual seed potatoes- as opposed to my home ripened store bought taters that I used in my last two bags. “Russian banana” is the type. Look. I really don’t care about type when it comes to spuds. Is it a potato? Great! I’ll eat it. But supposedly these are real tasty so I’ll give them a shot.
Whoever put the potatoes in the box made a mistake however as there were not 6 seed potatoes but 8!
My mother had to physically restrain me from ordering two more potato bags.
Apparently 10 total potato bags is too much.
Her very smart idea was to double up the seed potatoes in two of the bags to take advantage of their small size.
Like so.
Planting potatoes in bags is easy. You put a little dirt in your bag, that you roll down to a third of its complete height- put your seed potato in- then cover it with about an inch of more dirt.
Then you water.
Then you wait.
Bam! 6 more potato bags!
Here’s one of the old ones growing strong. Once this plant gets taller I’ll pour more dirt in to cover all but the top-most leaves. All the covered leaves will become potatoes!
God I love potatoes.
The Neanderthal Gardens 
Are potatoes sometimes duds? I never noticed. They are planted in groups, and the stems do not come up straight, so would be difficult to notice any missing. I never bought them before, but just cut up those from the previous year.
When I grow cruciferous vegetables, I separate the doubles. They recover so readily. However, we can not grow cauliflower so late.
Due to the fact that in SF our hottest months tend to be in August-October we can generally grow brassicas in late spring early-mid summer, so unless we have some unseasonably warm weather (always a possibility of course) the cauliflowers should be fine. As for the potatoes historically like 10% for me just don’t come up- I suspect because they’re smaller and maybe rot before they can sprout? I’m not sure, but since some of the seed potatoes were really small I figured it couldn’t hurt to double up.
Do you ever save the small potatoes to plant the following year?
I will this year, last time I grew Potatoes was about 4 years ago and due to some health issues I couldn’t grow anything afterwards for a while.
Oh, I know how that goes. That is partly why I grow no vegetables now.