 Hi there and welcome to my little garden here on the prairies. My name is Tracy and I am a Zone 3 gardener here in Saskatchewan Canada. So today is the 4th of July and I'm going to be planting some potatoes. So normally here in Zone 3, potatoes should be in the ground early May and to May at the latest. Maturity dates on potatoes that we grow here are usually 90 to 120 days. So I'm going to push the envelope here. I'm going to plant some potatoes today and I'm going to walk you through what I'm doing and why I'm going to plant potatoes this late in the season. Here in Zone 3, we're pretty much at the end of the season where the garden centers are open and the green houses are starting to shut down for the season because most plants need to be in the ground by this time. So if you're anything like me you start looking at all these poor little annuals and plants that are still sitting on the shelf in the greenhouse that nobody took home and their half price or their you know super cheap and you just can't resist. So you buy them and you bring them home and throw them in the ground and you know usually they thrive and you get some value out of them. So when I was in Walmart looking through their garden center I came across these potatoes here. So they're called a red snapper and they are a small red potato for patio and garden. So there's very little information on this bag but I took that as you know they are probably a faster growing small potatoes. So and they were half price. So that was one reason why I thought oh what the heck I'll buy them. The information like I said was pretty limited and I thought this was quite funny. The growing instructions provided say plant water harvest. So I thought that was kind of funny. There's a little more to it than that but so I did my own research looked up a red snapper to try and find out what the maturity date is on them and I couldn't actually find anything specific as to maturity date for a red snapper other than it's a fast growing early maturing potato kind of good baby potatoes. So might as well try it. So the other reason that I decided to try planting a few more potatoes is that I feel like I have a lot of unused growing space here in my straw garden beds. If you've watched some of my videos I planted some potatoes and containers under straw. I did three rows of potatoes in early May under straw and I also got my my ten corn seedlings here that are taking off good. So I still have you know quite a bit of space here. I also had these three containers all set up ready to transplant some raspberries from my raspberry patch. I was going to try to see how they would grow in containers. I got the the soil all prepared in these red tubs and then it got really hot here and the last couple weeks we've been going through some really high temperatures. I just didn't think it was a good time to try and transplant raspberries. So I put that project off until the fall or maybe next spring. So I thought why not get some potatoes in these containers cover them up with some straw and see how they grow. So I also wanted to share with you one of the mistakes that I made this spring when I was planting my potatoes under straw here. I had three different kinds I planted here and I marked my rows with these poles. It looks like for these potatoes what I think happened is I buried them too deep under straw initially and they never did come up and then I think just the straw became quite compacted you know after a couple rains this spring and so when it turned out that I only ended up with one two red norlin potato plants coming up in this row. I tried to loosen the straw a couple weeks ago just to see where they were at. I couldn't find them so they must have were not able to sprout and make their way up through the straw. So just something to keep in mind if you're using the potatoes under straw method that you don't bury them too deep to start and as they start to sprout and show up through the straw that's when you can heal it up with more straw as the plants grow. And potatoes are one of my husband's favorite crops from the garden and he was a little sad to see that this is all we have coming so I want to try and get some more going and hopefully we can enjoy more potatoes this fall. As you can see it we haven't got the tree from the plough wind storm we had the other day removed yet from my garden space so it is also taking up a little bit of and as you can see these seed potatoes have some have been chitting really well in these bags and they got some really strong sprouts that look very healthy and green. So I'm just gonna work through my space here and create some more room for starting these potatoes under straw. We will see if they can make it through the growing season to harvest before we get hit by cold weather or a killer frost. So going by a 90-day maturity date on these potatoes that would take us right to the end of September and that again is kind of pushing it here as far as growing because we usually get our first frost early to mid-September. Sometimes we're lucky and have a warm fall and don't get too many killer frosts in September but that's one of the obstacles that I am going to be dealing with and we will see what happens come the end of August early September where these potatoes are at. Okay so I have just created a whole whack of growing space out of this little area that was just going to waste so I have a small little area here and then leaving room here for my corn that's coming up. I've created another row here worked around my comfrey plants here wherever this birdbath is here because I have a big tree stump there that I needed to mark so that's why I have a couple different potted plants sitting sporadically here in this area they're just sitting on tree stumps so I don't trip over them. So like I said I got a nice L-shaped row going around my comfrey and then this row that only two norlands come up I just pulled back the straw again and I'm going to fill it up with some of these red snappers. There was a couple empty spaces in these two row of potatoes so might as well put some some of the seedling potatoes in there as well so let's get these planted. So keeping in mind that these are probably only going to get to a baby potato stage in the short time period that we have here I'm keeping them fairly close together. Don't think they're going to need too much growing space before the ground gets too cold they probably won't grow too too much after September so I'm just going to give them a light layer of straw and see if they these little sprouts take off and keep growing. As I mentioned at the beginning these three tubs contain I have a bunch of organic material at the bottom such as logs and twigs and leaves just to partially fill these containers and then I made us kind of a mixture of manure compost and some worm castings so this should be a nice little setup for these potatoes. I'm just going to give them a little bit of a berry under the dirt try to get it so the little roots are working their way up the right direction give them a little bit of a head start hopefully maybe so I'm putting seven in here and then to start with I'll just put a light layer of straw over top the straws got some got rained on it's nice and wet put it on a little light so it's not compacted these roots don't have to struggle to get through and then if I start to see some greenery coming through the straw I'll just put some more on just kind of hill it up like you would normally with dirt maybe not too much so there is about about two inches of straw over top of these seedlings so those three containers are planted up these are kind of at the back of my garden and as you can see this is the east here and then the sun comes around over here hits my garden so these containers pretty much get full sun right from sunrise till about four five in the afternoon and please watch for a harvesting out of the container video probably coming sometime in August this is a view of my garden from a different angle I don't think I've ever shared on any of my videos before but you can see that my garden is pretty small this is where the sun rises in the morning oh well way over here now in the east comes around the garden shed causes a bit of shade in this area where I just planted some of the potatoes but then the sun comes around and it's pretty much on the garden until about you know four or five in the afternoon so it gets pretty good sunlight here it's actually a really nice spot it's out of the wind and I really enjoy my gardening out here so as you can see I've taken this small little space that was probably maybe only half full of garden plants and filled it right up now with probably about 40 more baby potato plants so I'm very excited to see if this experiment planting this late in the season is going to work but that's just another reason why I'm trying this is because I think gardening is all about pushing the boundaries trying new things experimenting with techniques and plants that maybe aren't normal for this growing zone or traditional methods that our grandmother's always followed so we'll see how this turns out and I hope that you will subscribe and hit that notification bell to keep updated on what's going on with these ones thanks for hanging out with me in my garden we'll see you on the next video