Monday August 18

Finally a little relief.  I picked just one squash this week from the lone summer squash plant.  Bean harvests have slowed down also.  I picked a few more Provider bush beans from the patch that has been producing a second harvest.  Then I sent the plants to the compost bin - they had lots of rust and other ailments at this point - small wonder since they bore twice.  The Fortex pole beans have also slowed down.  These plants are beset with Harlequin bugs, at least that's what I think they are, and many of the beans are deformed. 

Still, I got a bit of many things.  Three large Diva cucumbers, some tomatoes, beans, one squash, a few okra.  This pic was this mornings harvest:

I collected the garlic drying in the pole barn rafters - a little under two pounds, about twice last year's harvest:

A total of just over 15 pounds for the week:

I was beginning to worry about the pepper harvest.  I plan to make one more batch of salsa and some chili powder.  But with the rainy mild weather we've been having I was concerned that the peppers may not ripen.  Well now the Marconi, Bullhorn and Ancho peppers are developing a bright red color, and the Joe Parker chilis are showing some red.  The sweet peppers will be grilled, deskinned and deseeded for the next batch of salsa.  I've found that mixing sweet pepper pulp into the tomato base makes a fine salsa. There are even a few bright red serranos on the tallest plant.  More tomatoes should be ready in a few days:

I found a black swallow tail caterpillar on the parnip.  If it was on the parsley I would have picked it off, but decided to leave it on this plant.  How much can it eat?  And they are a terrific butterfly, beautiful coloration and a strong flyer.

Monday August 11, 2014

Again another very productive week from the beds.  No surprise, it's August, but this is an exceptional year.  The mild temperatures have slowed some of the hot weather vegetables but everything else has more than taken up the slack.  A few Silver Queen okra are starting to develop, as shown here with the ubiquitous summer squash:

The summer squash plant hit a new peak this week, over 8 pounds of squash.  I grated up a good bit of it and put two cup portions into freezer bags.  I don't have the equipement to blanch/steam the grated squash so I'll probably need to use it in the next few months.  As if I didn't have enough squash someone left two yellow crooknecks on my front porch.  You'd think they could leave a calling card so I can return the favor.  Squash dumpers!

Also lots more beans.  Roma II, Provider and Fortex left to right in the picture.  The Tribute strawberries I planted this spring are bearing enough to provide a nice snack a few times a week, and they are delicious.  I didn't expect much the first year so this is a nice bonus.

More beans, squash and a few carrots.  Nearly 6 pounds of beans were picked:

Tomatoes early in the week:

I picked the first Marconi sweet peppers on Saturday, as well as Jalapeno and Serrano peppers.  The Diva cucumbers are showing signs of disease pressure.  The blemishes are only skin deep however:

With the tomatoes picked earlier I had the makings for a batch of salsa.  I canned 7 pints with an additional pint for the refrigerator.  I've got to say, canning salsa is a LOT of work - deskinning tomatoes, blending, fine chopping onions, peppers, parsley, cilantro (and somewhat painful when dicing the Serranos) then the final boil in the jars. It helps to have a very sharp knife.

And of course the potatoes, shown in the previous post - 27 and 1/2 pounds.  Combined with the Irish Cobblers dug up last week I got nearly 40 pounds of potatoes this year, not quite as much as last year.

All in all a good week, 54 pounds out of the garden, and 193 pounds for the year so far.  To see what other people are growing head on over to http://daphnesdandelions.blogspot.com/

 

Time to harvest potatoes

So when should a plant, or part of a plant be removed?  Is a leaf that is faded, yellow or showing signs of disease actually doing photosynthesis anymore?  Or is it really doing nothing but shading parts of the plant that are actually working and incubating microorganisms that will spread to other plants?  Your guess is as good as mine.  I think that a leaf that is not a healthy green is probably not doing much to contribute energy to the plant.

I went through the squash patch and removed any foliage I thought was useless.  No point in giving squash bugs more cover or shading out new growth.

After a rain shower last night this morning seemed like a good time to harvest the Red Pontiac potatoes.  I feel like the decontruction process has begun, and it wasn't that long ago that I was building up structures for the plants.  The potato foliage was mostly infected with fungi and there was no sign of any new growth - there was no point in waiting any longer. 

I devised a plan of sorts.  Cut off the stems a few inches above the soil, rake up and remove the several inches of shredded leaves covering the bed and put it all in the compost bin.  Then pull up the potatoes.  I tried raking up the leaves but some of the spuds were just below the leaves and I was concerned they would be damaged by the rake. 

So I set about pulling the potatoes up, grasping the stems and tugging gently.  This method worked well with the row of Irish Cobblers a few weeks ago and it worked well with these potatoes.  It looks like the leaf mold makes a fine potato mulch, blocking nearly all the light and keeping the soil underneath nice and friable.

Once I had removed as many potatoes as possible by hand I proceeded to rake up the leaf mold and take it to the compost bin.  Soon I'll start a new compost pile and try to encourage this pile to finish out before it gets cold.  Then I can amend some beds before winter.

I was able to get about three-fourths of the potatoes by hand.  To get the remaining potatoes the soil was turned over with a spade.  It's actually much easier to spade over when most of the potatoes have already been taken out, and no spud was sliced by the shovel.  Here's the haul, 27 and 1/2 pounds.  Some of the potatoes are well over a pound. 

Monday August 4

All in all, it was a very productive week from the vegetable beds.  The pace looks to be well ahead of last year.   This was a diverse harvest.  Of course there was a lot of summer squash.  Did I say that squash production was slowing down?  The lone plant (Cocozelle) was just taking a breather.  I've cut off excess leaves, but the squash, they just keep on coming in.  What I like about this variety, in addition to it's good flavor (for a summer squash) is it stays tender even when it gets large, as when I miss a day.  No pics of squash, there's really no point. 

The peppers have been slow to mature this year with the mild summer temperatures.  Last week I picked enough Jalapenos and Serranos to make a batch of salsa, using the Pompeii sauce tomatoes.  I hot canned 4 pints and set another pint in the refrigerator.  This time it was judged sufficiently hot - the Serranos bump up the heat a notch or two.

A few days later I found a tomato hornworm on the Serrano plant.  It seems like these caterpillars spring into life fully formed, and there they are as big as your finger busily defoliating the pepper plant.  I picked that one, tossed it into the pond, then two days later found ANOTHER one on the same plant.  It too went into the pond.  At this point the Serrano plant is more than half defoliated.  Looks like I'll have to buy some hot peppers.

The first eggplant was harvested.

More tomatoes, for the next batch of salsa:

More beans.  The long beans are Fortex. Provider beans are in the lower left and Roma II beans upper left.  I mentioned in an earlier post that the Provider beans, a bush bean, are from plants that had already had a flush of production then stopped, which is usually when I pull them up.  They are producing another flush of beans, which is a real bonus.

The Ruby Ring onions had been sun-drying for about two weeks and looked ready to store.  The tops were cut off and here they are before they were put in mesh bags.  The harvest totalled just over 19 pounds, a bit less than last year but considering that only half as much area was planted in  these onions I'm pleased with the results.  Combined with the four rows of Red Tropea onions the onion harvest is over 24 pounds.

This year I planted them a bit closer together.  Although there are no really large onions they are more consistent in size this year, what I think of as a medium sized onion.  Of all the onions I found only two with any defects at all.  They are all hard as rocks and should keep very well.

The total for the week is just over 40 pounds. 

To see what other people are growing head on over to http://daphnesdandelions.blogspot.com/

Midsummer update

It's a good time to check the progress of the vegetable garden this time of year.  Some plants have been harvested and are drying (garlic, onions), some are nearly finished (brassicas) and this year anyway some plants have barely started producing (eggplant, peppers, and okra).  The early potatoes (Irish Cobbler) are out while the Red Pontiacs will likely come out in a week or so.  And I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the winter squash will successfully ripen - it looks like a good year.

Ruby Ring onions sun-drying.

I don't plant crops for fall.  Not because I don't want to but because the trees to the south shade the garden too much in the fall.  Just not enough sunlight.  So from here on out it's essentially a winding down process.  I'm just going to go around the beds and show what's going on here.  Every year is different.

It looks like there are plenty of tomatoes.  There's one cage of slicers and two cages of sauce tomatoes, with two plants in each cage.  This is a really bad year for leaf blight and I don't expect much to be left come September.  But there will be quite a few for the next few weeks.  Yesterday I canned 5 pints of salsa and hope to can another batch in a few days.  I'm sold on the sauce tomatoes for canning.  The eggplant in front is in terrible shape.  I let the flea beetles get a good start and finally sprayed them with pyrethins.

This is unusual.  The Provider beans that I planted in mid-May are producing a second flush of beans.  Usually the bean beetles infest the plants after the first bearing and I rip the plants out to deny the beetles their food source.  This year, no beetles, so I let the plants stay. There won't be as many beans as the first time.

And right next to the beans is a new summer squash plant.  If it looks like it will start growing strongly then I will pull out the other one and let the sweet potatoes take over the space.  I can do without summer squash for a while.  Because the squash is a big plant it's easy to forget that it will mature faster than a bush bean, so it really can be succession planted. There's also a lone cauliflower plant, the last cole crop.

As for squash, the two Teksukabotu winter squash have run amok.  I let them send runners down the back side of the trellis into an area near the pond that is nearly devoid of topsoil.  There's a number of nice squash ripening up.

Inside the bed are also two butternut squash and one Honeybear acorn squash.  There are a number of butternuts forming up.  So far no squash bugs.  It looks like the long winter suppressed them as well as the bean beetles.

I planted two Silver Queen okra in the "barrens" near the runaway squash plants. Just dug up a spot of ground, stirred in some compost and planted them.  They would be doing better in the beds (last year they got nearly eight feet tall) but it looks like they will provide some okra in this spot.

The new perennial bed is coming along well.  This spring I planted six asparagus roots and now they are getting some size and continue making new shoots.  The strawberries, an everbearer called Tribute, are growing and making a few berries, which are delicious, but the birds are getting a lot of them.  Everything is doing well except the chive plant.  Go figure.

Finally there's the problem bed.  This bed grew spinach and lettuce in the spring.  I added more fertilizer and planted beets, carrots, two okra plants and bunching onions.  Everything looks stunted.  For years this bed underperformed because it was close to a large cherry tree, which although more dead than alive sent its roots into the bed.  The tree was cut down several years ago.  My thought is this bed needs a good infusion of compost.

I don't keep good records of which beds get compost every year and I may have missed this bed last year.   There's a batch of compost in the bin that is hot and working.  After the remaining potatoes are harvested I'll add the leaf mold from that bed into the compost, add some nitrogen and let it work up.  I'll start a new compost pile and let this one finish out.  This compost should be ready to go into the problem bed by first frost.

   

Monday July 28

All in all, a very productive week - 33.2 pounds out of the garden.  In the previous post the Irish Cobbler potatoes were dug up, giving me 11.5 pounds of potatoes.  The same day a bit over a pound of carrots were pulled up.  I know it's redundant but here's the pic again:

The Cobblers are a very starchy Russet potato.  I think they'd make great potato pancakes.

The last broccoli was harvested, a nice head at just over a pound.  The last Gonzalez cabbage was pulled up, a bit over 2 pounds (not shown):

There was the usual assortment of Fortex beans (about 3 pounds), cucumbers - both pickling and slicing totalling almost 4 pounds, and of course summer squash (about 5 1/2 pounds).  It looks like the summer squash plant is slowing down, which is fine.  Pictured here are the Calypso pickling cucumbers:

A nice picking of tomatoes, mostly Pompeii sauce tomatoes, about 5 pounds total.  Another picking this week and there should be enough tomatoes and hot peppers to make a batch of salsa.  Tomatoes this year are beset with leaf blight and it looks like it will overtake the plants by the end of August.  Next year I will definitely focus on buying disease resistant tomatoes. 

At this point yields are quite a bit ahead of last year.  In fact the total is just shy of 100 pounds so far, so overall I'm pleased with the garden production.  To see what other people are growing stop by http://daphnesdandelions.blogspot.com/  

First potatoes

This year I planted two varieties of potatoes - Irish Cobbler and Red Pontiac.  The red potatoes are the mainstay that I plant every year.  Their yields are very good and they keep well.  I try to plant a little of another variety for, well, variety.  This year I planted two rows of Red Pontiac and one row of Irish Cobbler, a russet potato. 

The Irish Cobbler looked like they needed to come out, the leaves were mostly yellow from fungal infestation and the stems collapsed.  Since it rained the night before it seemed like a good time to harvest them.   I tried grasping all the stems of a plant in one hand and slowly tugging them up.  It worked.  The potatoes came up in a nice clump.

This approach never worked in the past, when the usual procedure was to carefully spade over every inch of soil, so what was different this time?  Well last fall I shredded a lot of leaves, too many in fact to put them all in the compost bin, so I piled some on the beds.  After planting the seed potatoes this spring I covered the entire bed with several inches of shredded leaves.  I think the leaf mold provided a very good cover - it blocked out most of the light but let air in and kept the soil moist. 

After pulling up the row of potatoes this way I raked up the leaf mold and put it into the compost bin, along with the potato foliage.  Some of the leaf mold was pushed over to the remaining potatoes.  

Once the leaf mold was removed I spaded over the soil to find any potatoes that did not come up by pulling.  I only got three small potatoes from this, so nearly all of the potatoes came up when I pulled up the plants.  Well that was about the easiest potato harvest ever.  The yield from this row of potatoes (six seed potatoes) was about 11 and 1/2 pounds.  Not bad.  I also pulled up some more misshapen carrots.

If the past is any guide, the Red Pontiacs should outyield these potatoes by about 50%.