Attleboro, MA? Or Seattle, WA?

Another wet week in this very wet summer...

Are my potatoes OK?

I know I've left that July 4th post lingering, but I wanted to get this one up. I'll elaborate on the other one soon.

The past couple of days, coinciding with the summer weather that has finally arrived, I've noticed that our potato plants don't seem to be doing so great. Many of them are turning yellow and getting all droopy - quite clearly, they're dying. Now, I know that eventually the plants die back, but I don't think that is supposed to happen for quite some time. But this is our first attempt at potatoes, so I really don't know. Here's what some of the plants are looking like (click on the image for a bigger view):


I'm starting to get nervous about our potato crop (or potential lack thereof). So, while in the garden this afternoon tying up some of the tomatoes, I decided to do a little digging around the potatoes to see what was going on. At first I couldn't find anything that remotely resembled a potato (unless you count rocks). Now I was very worried. I decided to try another spot and after a few seconds my fingers brushed up against something that seemed promising. I carefully brushed more dirt away and to my great surprise, pulled up this guy:


Looks like the potatoes have done just fine. :)

Veggie Garden Roundup

Just wanted to give a quick run down of what we have growing in our home vegetable garden (and other vegetable "areas") along with some pics.

Main Garden Bed

Potatoes (2 varieties)
Yukon Gold
Russian Banana Fingerling

Summer Squash (1 variety)
Cocozelle Zucchini (x4)


Tomatoes (16 varieties!)
Brandywine (x2)
Super Sweet 100 (x1)
Caruso (x2)
Prince Borghese (x1)
Yellow Perfection (x1)
Pole Perfect Purple (x1)
Red Grape (x2)
Sun Gold (x2)
Sweet Chelsea (x1)
Mountain Princess (x1)
Caspian Pink (x2)
Mountain Delight (x1)
Margherita (x1)
Cherokee Purple (x2)
Garden Peach (x2)
Green Zebra (x2)



Onions (2 varieties)
Copra
Cippolini


Broccoli (x4) - FAILED (bunny food and already flowering)


Peas and Beans (3 varieties) - limited success
Oregan Giant (edible pod pea)
Blauhilde (pole bean)
Royal Burgandy (bush bean)


Container Garden


Peppers (4 varieties)
Thai Dragon (x2)
Red Beauty (x2)
Sweet Banana (x1)
Carmen Sweet Italian (x1)


Carmen Peppers - don't they look incredible? (more on these in a later post)
Tomatoes (4 more varieties)
Matt's Wild Cherry
Sweet Pea Currant
Small Fry
Mr. Ugly

Misc
Eggplant (x1)
Garden Huckleberry (x1)
Ground Cherry - Cossack Pineapple (x1)


Cold Frame #1
Swiss Chard (Charlotte)
Carrots (Danvers 126)


Cold Frames #2
replanted with leaf lettuce and arugula after recent tragedy
(not looking particularly promising)

Cold Frame #3 and #4 - new this year
Being re-evaluated after limited success with leaf lettuce, beets, and swiss chard and complete failure with purple dragon carrots (100% failed germination)

Other areas
Asparagus bed
Rhubarb bed
Herb containers (basil, parsley, oregano, cilantro)

Wow. I knew we had a lot, but I've never tried listing everything all at once. And this doesn't even include our small community garden patch! We must be nuts. Seriously, I'm quite happy with what we've accomplished so far - our successes seem to outnumber (or at least outweigh) our failures. Can't really complain about that.

Salt Hay Mulch

I hate weeding. I also hate weeds in the vegetable garden^*. So, something's gotta give. The past couple of years, the weeds have won. Try as we might, we just can't keep up, and by July 4th I'm often rationalizing the state of our garden by saying that we're just camouflaging the vegetables from the herbivores. Nobody seems to buy it. So, this year, I decided to give mulching a try. I wasn't really sure what the best thing to do was - I wanted natural, but I also wanted effective, and I'm not convinced I could get both. Well, after very little research (which is unlike me), we ended up mulching with some salt marsh hay (actually, we went to our local nursery to get a sheet of black plastic, but they didn't have it and the guy suggested the salt hay. Since the salt hay is a lot more natural than plastic, his suggestion was pretty much all I needed)

First I did some preliminary weeding, hoping to set the little buggers back a bit. Then I laid some old newspaper down between the vegetable rows before placing a layer of the salt marsh hay down. The neighbors had a good laugh watching me try to get both the newspaper and the hay down while the wind gusted up every now and then. But in the end, I used up one of the two bales, pretty much covering the rows between our tomatoes and zucchini. Th onions and beans still seemed too small for me to be messing around them - if/when they get bigger, I'll add more hay - and I left the potatoes clear so I can "ridge" them.

I don't actually expect to beat the weeds. I'm just hoping to stave them off a little while. Hopefully, we don't end up with an abundance of weeds growing up through the hay.






^* "weeds" in the lawn however are just fine - in fact, I'm pretty sure our neighborhood hates us since we're most certainly the source of 99.9% of the dandelions in our area. Our lawn is pretty much the exact opposite of uniform, green, and grassy. But it is alive with bees, snakes, frogs, and caterpillars - which is far more important.

First Harvest!

We had our first salad from our garden the other day. A nice mix of leafy lettuce, arugula, and baby Swiss chard. Sixty-three days from seed to table.

Planting Potatoes

A couple of years ago, Linda, the kids and I visited some friends who had taken over their family farm in Pennsylvania. We happened to be there during potato harvest time. I knew how potaotes grew - I understood it intellectually - but I never witnessed it. So, we all helped dig out the potatoes and I can honsestly say that I was amazed. Seriously, I stood awed by the fact that I took a shovel, stuck it into the ground, turned over the soil, and half a dozen beautiful potatoes were right there. It was like digging for buried treasure I guess.

Well, today I planted our first batch of potatoes - setting the stage for our own treasure hunt in a few months. We ordered two different sets of seed potatoes - Yukon Gold and Russian Banana Fingerlings. I cut each potatoe into pieces - each with a eye or two (or, in some cases, a sprout or two) - let them callus over a bit overnight, and planted them a few inches deep.

Cold frames and beets

For the past few of years, we've used a couple of cold frames for some of our veggies - mostly leafy greens (e.g. Swiss chard, leaf lettuce, arugula, escarole, etc.) They work really great as they let us sow seeds directly outside much sooner in the spring, and the small, confined areas are easy to keep weed- and herbivore-free and well-watered. This year, I added two more frames to the backyard to increase our yield by staggering our plantings across a couple of months - this way, hopefully, we'll have a continuous supply of lettuce, chard, and carrots throughout the summer and into the fall (I plan on resowing at the end of the summer for fall, and perhaps even winter harvesting). The first cold frames I made out of plywood, some poplar 1x2s, and sheets of thin plexiglass cut to size - all bought from Home Depot. This year, I asked my grandfather, who owns a millworking business if he could cut me some plywood to size since I really don't have the right tools. Well, as I should have expected, given the way my grandfather operates, instead of plywood, I got a top-of-the-line exterior-grade composite, called Extira. It was completely unnecessary and definitely overkill, but I happily used the pieces and put the new cold frames to work this afternoon.


Into the new frames went another sowing of spring leaf lettuce mix and Swiss chard, some purple dragon carrots, and some beets. If the beet seeds look remarkably like Swiss chard seeds, it's because they're just different cultivars of the the same species - Beta vulgaris.

Beets:

The asparagus are coming! The asparagus are coming!

Last year, we planted 8 asparagus plants. They seemed to do well. When fall came we cut back the first years growth and put the plants to bed for the winter (which just means we covered them with a bit more soil and let them be). I've been anxiously watching the bed the past month, waiting to see signs that the plants made it through the winter OK. Well, I finally have proof that at least one plant is still alive. Hopefully the others will follow shortly.

Swiss chard on its way!

Looks like I may not need to resow my first Swiss chard batch after all. They're up and looking good. (Also exciting - I think I may see some carrot sprouts, but I'll give them a few more days to be sure)

March seedlings

I planted some lettuce and arugula seeds just under two weeks ago and they seem to have taken. The cold frame is doing its job - even with sub-freezing night temperatures all week. YAY!

(that's my flash drive in the photos for scale)

Lettuce:


Arugula:
(I think I'll need to thin the arugula at some point)

No signs of carrot or Swiss chard though, even with the temporary plastic cover I put on the other cold frame :( (though I don't really expect to see carrot seedlings for a while - they're notorious for taking a long time to germinate)

More sowing

After getting my lettuce seeds in the ground yesterday, I felt emboldened to sow a few more veggies today - carrots, swiss chard, and arugula. I may be pushing things a bit, especially with the carrots, but from what I've read, I think this might work (I am trusting the University of Rhode Island Master Gardening planting calendar - we're not in RI, but we're close and in the same USDA Hardiness Zone). The arugula went into the other side of the lettuce cold frame and the carrots and swiss chard went into the cover-less cold frame, which makes it just a "frame" I guess (BTW the cover got blown off last summer during a particularly blustery storm). UPDATE: Nighttime temperatures in the teens got me worried so I rigged a temporary cover out of a clear plastic landscaping sheet and some logs/rocks to keep it from blowing away. I expect I'll need to replant when it gets warmer.

Arugula:


Swiss chard:


Carrot:

Planting lettuce

I decided to sow a crop of lettuce outside today. I know it's only the middle of March, but lettuce is a cool weather plant and I sowed the seeds in a cold frame. All in all, I'm hoping this will give us a jump on the growing season. I've sowed lettuce seeds in the cold frame the past few years, but never this early, so this is an experiment of sorts. The soil temperature inside the cold frame is above 50°F and even with the air temp in the low 50s, the cold frame was maintaining 70°F - ideal conditions for the Spring Mix we ordered from The Cook's Garden. If all goes well, we'll be eating fresh salad by early May.