On the garden front

All is well.
Some things are starting to show some signs of slowing, while others are really just kicking in. Some of the tomatoes for instance, while still giving prodigious harvests, ( I'll go into that later ) are starting to show signs of stress. The long hot summers do take their toll on things by this time of the year. But hey, They take their toll on me too so I can't blame them.

on the other hand, our green pole beans are really just coming on strong now. I thought that we wouldn't get a good harvest of them this year, and it still won't be as good as last years, but after consulting that garden journal from last year (can I tell you what a blessing that thing has been!) we found that our first substantial harvest of green beans last year wasn't until mid September either. We figure we're about 2 weeks behind. That will catch up to us on the back end, but honestly I couldn't have handled more if they'd have come any earlier!

A couple of other things that have been fun this year have been our green peppers and eggplants.
I don't know if it was a product of the long cool spring that we had giving them a chance to root well, or if the new Lasagna garden that I planted them in just acted like rocket fuel to them, but we got a better crop of both of them this year than we've ever gotten. And of course this years new crop for us was Okra. I followed the instructions of a woman that I met in our Master Gardener program that had learned to grow them in the south and they've done great! To think that last year I never even managed to get them to germinate and this year I'm harvesting bunches at a time. It's all about planing the seed direct well after any chance of cool weather. They like it hot.
I mentioned that we pulled our Mid season potatoes a while back. I never did manage to get a photo of that harvest up though. It was a good one so I thought I'd share.

We got a few tomatoes, cukes, a watermelon and such then too. We've eaten a lot of potatoes, but they're mostly a fall/winter thing for us so many of these are in the cold storage waiting for Thanksgiving.

I guess while I'm on the topic of harvests I can meander off in that direction with you. We've done well this year. We set a goal of 1500 pounds during the winter while we were working up our garden plan for this year. It was ambitious to say the least, but we figured what could it hurt to shoot for the moon. Well, we lost our entire pumpkin crop as well as a few zucchini plants and our watermelons to squash bugs this year. They were TERRIBLE. That's set us back quite a bit I think but as of tonight we have a running total of 745.25 pounds (Not counting eggs of course.) so I think we're doing pretty darn good. We'll hit 1000 lbs this year I'm sure or at least come pretty darn close. Last year for the entire year we got a total of 521 pounds so if nothing else we can be glad to have well beaten our own best.

We also set a one day harvest record for ourselves a couple of weeks ago. Remember
I said I'd get back to the prodigious tomatoes? Well, thanks in no small part to a one day harvest of 140 pounds, we brought in just over 166 pounds in one day. Curious what 140 pounds of tomatoes looks like?

For perspective, they're covering the top of our full-sized chest freezer. Suffice it to say we had a lot of tomatoes!

So then what's a family to do with all this stuff? Well, besides eat it of course. We gave a good bit of it away to friends and like the old saying we're so fond of...

"Eat what you can and CAN what you can't" we put up a bunch of jars this year. more to come on that.

P~

2008 Garden Update - Potted Potatoes

I've been planing to plant potatoes like this for a couple of years now, but have never gotten ahead of things early enough to do it. This year, thanks to a little planning and some good luck, I will get it done.

You can see the pots that I'll be using. They're approximately 18-20" in diameter, and about that deep. I was at a local small family nursery late last week, and asked the owner if he had any old large sized planters that I might be able to buy from him. As luck would have it, he directed me to the back of one of their workshops and told me I could have whatever I wanted from there. SCORE, recycled pot's for free!! Rule number one for effective scroung... er... um... acquisition of otherwise unused materials... (much better) is that you never know unless you ask. And please, ask before you take.

Anyway, so I got the pots. Now I needed some fill. I was able to get some fairly decent topsoil from a construction site that was in the neighborhood, and supplemented it with a nearly equal portion of compost. I also turned in a little vermiculite, and some straw to add to the tilth of the soil, and help with drainage.
Here you can see what I did at the bottom of the pots. I lined the drain holes with, and a placed a thin layer of straw at the bottom of the pot again to help with drainage. Soggy potato plants make for disease and poor harvest from what I've read.


Here you have a couple of the finished pots, filled halfway with the potting mix. I don't think I should need more soil than this, at least to start with. As the plants begin to grow, I will add more straw/soil mix on top to help to boost production, eventually adding a mesh frame to allow me to pack straw around the plants and continue growing up.

All together I have 9 pots to plant in. Here's my question for you; how many plants would you put in each one? I was initially thinking I could support three seed pieces, but is that too much? Any experience with planting taters in pots anyone? Comments are appreciated.

Till next time..

P~