I am overly proud of my potato bed. I can’t stop looking out the window at it! It’s nothing spectacular - quite the opposite in fact - but I made it myself and I’m enamored with it. I even used the level to make sure it was sitting level in the ground. Turns out the shed beside it is not level though. It looks pretty scrubby around the bed but I’ve sprinkled grass seed and once I get rid of the pile of dirt that came out of it and is now heaped beside it, I’ll sprinkle seed there too. The bed sits in the perfect spot in my yard as the grass there was scrubby and sparse and it was no loss to dig it up.

The grass in the sun is beyond blown out. I couldn’t fix it in Photoshop.

I ended up not using weed mat partly because I didn’t have any, partly because I couldn’t justify buying some when all I’d need was a small piece, and partly because the ground looked pretty good at the depth that I’d dug it. I just spread on a thin layer of the 1:1:1 mixture of peat moss, vermiculite, and compost/manure that I used for the raised garden beds, planted my potato pieces, and spread on another layer to cover the sprouts. When the sprouts break the surface and grow a few inches, I’ll put on another layer of mix to cover them. I’ll repeat this until the mix is a couple of inches from the top of the frame and then I’ll let the potato plants do their thing. I can’t wait to see those first sprouts! I’m a little worried that my potato pieces are too small. After I’d cut them a week ago I read that they should be two ounces minimum. Each of my pieces has two to three eyes but I have no idea how big the pieces are.