Hilling Potatoes and Transplanting Tomatoes -- Ninety Seventh Post

One of my weirdly distinct memories from grade school is not knowing how to spell "potato" and/or "tomato" because I couldn't remember which one had an "e" on the end. Turns out, neither one does, except in the plural.
My darling plants are at some crucial stages: the beets really need to go into their forever pots but it's too cold at night, my remaining tomato seedling is about three inches tall and starting to mysteriously lose leaves, I just planted my carrot seeds, and my potatoes have finally sprouted. The peas are doing the best, having all sprouted happily and transitioned easily from their indoor life to their forever pot. I'm going to split credit between their natural hardiness and my clever plan to start them in decomposable pots, thus eliminating stress to their roots during transplanting.
My root and leaf vegetables are all a little iffy. The celery seems to be making a comeback from whatever it was that ailed it, but my kale never sprouted. The bok choy seem to be doing well, but they're still all crowded into a tiny terra cotta pot and I don't think they would appreciate transplant at this point even if I had a good place for them. My surviving beets are all pretty vigorous, but they're growing indoors in temporary pots with no real plan for where to settle them and tend to break at the soil line when exposed to wind. The radishes, in with the celery, are leggy and the parsnips only just sprouted. It could be worse!
Anyway, on to the real reason I started to write this post: potatoes and tomatoes.
Both tomatoes and potatoes have the nifty ability to root from their stems, making it highly lucrative (if your currency is potatoes) to bury the stems or "hill" the potatoes as they grow. For tomatoes, you can increase their health and likelihood of outdoor survival if you bury the stems when you transplant them because it wildly improves and enlarges their root systems. A critical step in cultivating both plants is actually carrying out the burying of stems.
In the case of tomatoes, which those of us in cool climates have to start indoors or buy half-grown, there comes a time when they will be planted in a forever site, be it indoor pot, outdoor pot, or the ground.

Image from http://www.cyber-north.com/gardening/tomato.html

At this point, you will dig a hole big enough that your tomato can sit in it up to its lowest set of leaves. If it's a particularly tall plant and you have a lot of space or it's just really compact and has leaves all the way down to the ground, you can pinch off a few sets of leaves close to the ground. Another nifty trick if you have the space is the trench method, wherein you dig a little trench and plant your tomato sideways, gently training the top at a right angle to the ground so that it grows upright. I really like the idea of this method, but I almost certainly won't have space. For those who start tomatoes from seed, you should repot them at least once before they reach their forever home and bury the stem each time. It's really important for those of us with a little bit of a brown thumb or less than ideal growing conditions, because those extra roots will really give your plant a leg up on its circumstances in addition to renewing the dirt. If you're a hydroponic/aquaponic/non-dirt gardener, I have no idea what to tell you. I have a hard enough time with normal growing, and your way is kind of expensive.
For potatoes, stem-burying comes in the form of hilling. Like the name implies, you build up dirt around the stems, nearly to the tops of the leaves.

Image from https://www.quickcrop.co.uk/product/3-pack-potato-patio-planter

A brief google search indicates that 6-8 inches of stem is the best amount of time to let your potato vines grow before hilling. Since they don't put roots down, but rather out, potatoes are actually fantastic container plants. Just plant your seed potatoes on a few inches of soil in the bottom of a deep container with decent drainage, add another few inches of soil, and wait. Water well. When you've got 6-8 inches of vine, bury all but the top few inches of the plants and wait for the next 6-8 inches of vine to grow. Again, water well, because the buried vines are going to put off a lot of little potato babies and those babies need water to develop. After another 6-8 inches of vines have grown, bury all but the top few inches in dirt, straw, or mulch of some kind (I've seen arguments for everything, so do your own research and see which ought to work best in your particular garden) and (wait for it) water well. Wait for the vines to flower and then die back, then dump your container onto a tarp/plastic tablecloth (or someplace where extra dirt and potato bits are acceptable) and pick through it for your buried treasure. If you plant them in the ground, you'll be able to hill dirt around the stems from nearby, but you'll also have to do actual digging come harvest, which can result in damaged potatoes.

Guerrilla Gardening Tip of the Whenever I Get Around To Posting -- Eighty Fourth Post

Sorry about the lack of posting, but good news! I'll be in university a few years longer, as I've been accepted to a couple of graduate schools' PhD programs. More time for this blog to be relevant to my life!

Anyway, I've become quite taken with the idea of guerrilla gardening lately. Being a broke college senior who rents in a town with lots of green space within walking distance means I can't really do it now, but I have big plans.
Big.
Plans.

So here is a definition of guerrilla gardening, made up by me with input from various sources: it's where you plant stuff without permission, preferably on public grounds, really preferably without anyone knowing it's you. Alternatively, it's planting food instead of a lawn. Actually, it's whatever you want it to be. It can be taking control of your food source (especially if you live in a "food desert"), or just making a vacant lot prettier. It can be composting all your food scraps and then growing plants in that compost or just planting an avocado seed in your room. The whole point of this movement, as I see it, is just doing what you can.

Here is a video of a food-planting guerrilla gardener in south central Los Angeles, California. I'm not planning on living permanently (owning my own place) anywhere for a while, though.
So my preferred form of guerrilla gardening is just planting things where they don't belong. I'd like to point out that other people's yards are off-limits, although it's tempting to toss a seed bomb into a really run-down lawn.
Seed bombs are an easy form of guerrilla gardening. They would be fun if you lived by vacant lots; just toss and wait for rain to wash the seeds and their probably nutritious surrounding material into the ground, where they should grow without much care. It should go without saying that you shouldn't plant invasive species, noxious weeds, or anything like that in public spaces, so please do some research BEFORE you set out to change the world.

Etsy has lots of seed bombs. Photo by PulpArt, all rights are belong to them.

For the more ballsy guerrilla gardener, planting seedlings or bulbs in public spaces under cover of darkness is an option.

For the purposes of this blog, my Tip of the Whenever I Get Around To Posting will mostly consist of general garden tips; it just sounds cooler to call it guerrilla gardening. I'm planning to post about starting seeds indoors and keeping them there, growing food in small spaces, and generally beautifying your living space in affordable ways.
Sneak peak: use yogurt containers with holes poked in the bottom as planters.

I'm pretty excited about this, so hopefully I can keep going with it. For some reason, I've become more dedicated to things since getting into grad school; maybe it's the fact that I'll have to be devoted to a single project and goal for three years, minimum. Anyway, I've started feeling serious about things like feminism and equality and doing things for yourself.
But that's a topic for another post.