Welcome to Cranky Puppy Farm!

This blog belongs to two Gen X-er's smackdab in downtown Kansas City where we've been renovating and decorating two old Victorians built in the 1890's. Our life is filled with 3 demanding Pomeranians (1 of them cranky, of course), honking cars, noisy neighbors and the hustle and bustle of city life but we dream of the day when we can move to our 40-acre farm and hear nothing but the wind and the cows next door. Until then, we're chronicling our triumphs and mishaps here as we try to garden and preserve on 2 city lots, raise chickens, and learn all those things we should have learned from our grandparents. Welcome to our world - we hope you'll stay awhile!

Potatoes Are Peeking

Saturday, April 07, 2012


Voila!  A little less than two weeks after we planted our Yellow Finn potatoes, we have little potato plants peeking through the soil.  I am so excited about our first try at growing these.  I knew some of the stuff growing in there were weeds but I was afraid to pull anything until I was sure they weren't potatoes.  But now I know that a potato seedling looks like this:



I guess I might as well give you an update of some other happenin's around the Farm.   I need to do another post about the quilt for those of you who are following along.  I've got all the strips sewn together and the next steps are to square up the quilt top and then attach the two borders and the binding.  And then we're done!

I want to thank all of you again for your concern about our poor hen-pecked Henrietta.  She is recouping nicely in her hen condo in the basement.  We still have not determined how to re-integrate her, so I need to work on that.  Her neck is healing up nicely but I want to make sure that she is fully healed before we give the other girls access to her.  On that same note, I now convinced that we have a feather picker in our midst.  Giving them additional protein and a Flock Block to keep them from getting bored isn't fixing the problem.  This weekend, I'm going to clean out the coop and inspect everyone for mites and lice.  I suspect we may have a problem there and that's what is causing the feather loss.  And I need to spend a longer time watching them to see if I can determine who the feather picker culprit is. 

Our Early Girl tomato plants have doubled in size since we planted them on the 27th.  We've got Beefsteak and Roma teenagers growing in the basement, so I'm hoping to have tomatoes all summer long.

This old girl is a work horse.  She deserves a new
 coat of paint and a grill.
J. and I are thinking about getting a newer, bigger tractor for our 40 acres.  We've got an old Ford Industrial 4400 with a backhoe and loader but the thing is huge!  We really need something a little more compact that we could use for projects here as well.  When we bought our John Deere, we really should have bought one with a loader and mine doesn't even have the connector box or joystick to add one.  It is a GREAT mowing tractor, though.

There are 3 auctions today that all have some really nice tractors that would work perfectly:  a John Deere 790 (27 hp), a Kubota L4330 (45 hp) and a Kubota MX5100 (50 hp).  All have loaders on them.   If you have one of these tractors and can make a recommendation for or against any of them, I'd really appreciate it.  Now we're trying to figure out how the two of us can be at all 3 auctions at once.

It's a rainy day here, so no outside work for us.  What are your plans for this weekend?

This post is linked to this week's Country Garden Showcase, Tuesday Garden Party and Garden Life hops.

4 comments:

  1. Mine are about 4" tall, lookin good! Happy Resurrection Day to all of you!

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  2. You're ahead of us, Clint. They're just about 2" tall this morning. How long ago did you plants your and what variety are you growing this year? I've got some Yukon Golds also and, now that the weather has gone back to normal here (somewhat), I'm thinking about growing those in a trash can.

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  3. The potatoes are coming along nicely. Here in Germany they're not popping out of the ground yet. We don't plant any of our own because you can actually go into the fields here and harvest the small leftover spuds right after the big machines go through. It's an old post-war thing. We canned 30 liter jars of potatoes from them about 2 years ago. SO yummy! And kinda nice not to have to do the digging ourselves :)

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  4. Tiffany: Wow, that's really neat that you can just go pick them up. And the farmers don't mind that you do that?

    I've got a question for you. Does canning the potatoes change their taste or texture? I have always wanted to try canning potatoes, but was afraid that it would change them too much.

    ReplyDelete

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