growing food

Potato beds put to bed

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Today, we took advantage of the warmer weather and dug up our two potato beds.

The first one got done fairly early in the morning, before we headed to the city. Having already dug up a few of them earlier, I had some idea of what to expect, but I have zero experience with growing potatoes the “Ruth Stout” way.

I first pulled up the potato plants, then carefully used my potato fork to lift off, then “rake” the mulch away. Here, you can see some of the potatoes I uncovered in the process.

I also uncovered several chilled little frogs! I carefully moved them to the mulch by the squash, where they could warm up in the sun.

I also uncovered slugs.

I did not rescue them. ;-)

Almost all the potatoes I found were just sitting on top of the soil! Some took a little more raking away of the mulch to find, but not much more.

What had been rock hard ground when we started, the mulched soil was so much easier to work – even with all the rocks.

I took advantage of the situation and dug up the entire plot, so I could pull out as many weed roots as I could. The crab grass came out pretty easily. Then I hit a solid mass of roots near the surface, with a tap root of some kind that continued deep into the ground. I could not get it out with the fork! If I’d had the spade handy, I might have been able to cut through it, but since it seemed to be dead, I left it. It will be buried.

I did find a couple more potatoes in the process!

The end result looked like a 4×8 foot grave! :-D

When I finished pulling up as many roots as I was able, the mulch all went back – along with the potato plants that had been pulled up.

These are all the potatoes I got out of the one bed.

Also, note the one slightly darker potato with the arrow pointing to it. I’ll explain that, below!

When we got back from the city, I continued working on the second bed.

Once again, I was finding most of the potatoes on the surface of the soil as I pulled away the mulch.

These are all the potatoes I found, before I did any digging at all. Unfortunately, quite a lot of them had holes eaten into them. :-( After digging, I found maybe 5 more.

Speaking of 5, do you see those 5 darker potatoes on the side?

Those are the original seed potatoes! The other bed had only one. While they had stems and roots that I broke off of them, they are just as hard as the day I planted them. I found the remains of some other seed potatoes, all mushy and used up like one would expect at the end of the growing season.

I got two 3 pound boxes of seed potatoes, which gave me 3 row of 6 potatoes in one bed, and 3 rows of 5 potatoes in the other, plus an extra. That’s 34 potatoes – and 6 in total never grew more potatoes!

As with the previous bed, I dug it all up, finding a few more potatoes, a whole lot more slugs, and pulling out weed roots.

Would slugs be the cause of those holes in the potatoes?

This bed had quite a few more rocks near the surface that I got rid of, too. My fork was hitting many more as I dug down, but I didn’t try to get them out, since we will continue to build these beds up. The mulch and old potato plants went back over the soil.

I then took all the harvested potatoes and laid them out on the dry straw mulch between squash beds, so they can cure (is that the right word for it?) in the sun. Except for the tiniest ones, which will be cooked and eaten right away. :-)

I then had the 6 original seed potatoes. What to do with those??

Yeah. I planted them, almost the same way they were planted in the original beds. The only difference is that I did loosen the soil a bit, first. Not to bury the potatoes – there are so many rocks along this end, I could barely do more than scrape away the mulch on top! No, it was so I could push in the bamboo poles to mark where they are. Even then, I don’t think the poles will be able to stay up for long. I could barely get them into the soil at all. No matter how I shifted and searched, I kept hitting rocks just inches below the surface.

What will most likely happen is that the potatoes will freeze over the winter, and nothing will come of them. Another possibility is that they will be protected by the mulch and, as soon as it gets warm enough next spring, they will start growing and we’ll have early potatoes started.

We’ll find out next year!

As for now, the potato beds are put to bed for the winter. I don’t know what we will plant in those spots next year. We do intend to do potatoes again, but in a different location. We don’t want to entice the Colorado potato beetle by planting in the same location again. We didn’t see a single one this year, but one of my neighbours a mile up the road mentioned that his potatoes had been decimated by them! My parents always planted lots and lots of potatoes, and I well remember going through the rows, picking off the beetles or their larvae, and hunting for the eggs to crush. Even with several of us doing that every day, some years my mother had to resort to using a poison powder of some kind, to get them under control.

I’d really rather not have to deal with them at all, if I can avoid it!

As for the squash, for now I have stopped harvesting any more of the sunburst squash, though there are a couple of zucchini that are almost large enough to pick. I prefer them when they are quite small, but with the sunburst squash, I want to give them as much of the remaining warm weather as I can for them to grow. As I write this, past 6pm, we are still at 21C/70F. We are supposed to stay fairly warm over the period covered by the long range forecast, with no more frosts expected overnight. That should give our produce a bit more time before we have to harvest what we can, then prep for the winter – and next year’s gardening! :-)

Our first year gardening since moving here has been quite interesting, and quite the learning experience. We will, for sure, continue using the Ruth Stout method until we are able to start making the accessible raised beds that are the ultimate goal. The extensive use of mulch is making a very noticeable, positive difference in the soil, even after just one year. My mother may be disappointing in our gardening, compared to what she had here, years ago, but I’m happy with our progress so far! :-)

The Re-Farmer

In the sun

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I just couldn’t resist sharing these photos!

I’m happy to say that last night’s frost seems to have had no effect on the sunflowers at all.

The only leaves with frost damage that I saw were leaves that had first been broken by the high winds we had a few days ago.

Right now, we’ve got seed heads at pretty much all stages of opening and ripening!

The birds seem to have finally discovered this one. Based on what I researched, I should be able to cut this seed head off and set it up to dry, but in the video I saw that demonstrated this, the guy was able to easily brush off the flower heads from the seeds. That isn’t happening on this seed head at all! The ones that haven’t already fallen off on their own are still attached quite well.

The girls and I will be heading into the city tomorrow, but I might harvest this seed head after we come back. If not then, then the day after. I’m planning to dig up the potato beds as well. We’ll see how the timing of things goes.

Hopefully, tomorrow’s trip to the city will be more productive than today’s – but that will get it’s own post later!

The Re-Farmer

Crab apple picking

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Today, I headed out to pick the apples off of one of our crabapple trees.

This is the one that has such bright red, sweet apples. It also ripens earlier than the other trees.

Last year, most of the apples disappeared before I had a chance to harvest them, so I wanted to get them before the … deer? … get them first.

When we were cleaning things out, I was flummoxed by finding a grabber with spoons attached to it. My mother eventually remembered that my dad used it to pick apples.

I’m happy to say that it works absolutely beautifully!

Since there were so many apples to pick this year, I laid out a sheet on the ground for them to fall on. It also made it much easier to move the apples into a bucket.

I was able to fill a 5 gallon bucket just with the apples I could reach with my hands, or the grabber. I did try shaking the trees, too, but the branches are a bit too thick to be able to shake much at that height, so I didn’t get a lot that way.

Using the step ladder, I was able to fill another 5 gallon bucket. I could have gotten more, but by then, it was getting too dangerous to try and get the apples, even with the grabber. The remaining apples will be for the birds. :-)

Ten gallons of apples is so awesome! Last year, I used the apples from this tree to make apple cider vinegar. After trimming and chopping, I filled a quart jar 3/4s full.

That’s it. That’s all we had.

This year, I plan to make more apple cider vinegar, then juice at least a gallon, to make hard apple cider. There should still be plenty to give to my family, when they come out this weekend, if they want some.

For the hard apple cider, we have gallon jugs, bungs and airlocks to use. When we made apple cider vinegar in a quart jar last year, it was a success, but there was a problem with fruit flies being attracted to the coffee filter covered jar in the cupboard. So this year, I plan to use an air lock (they’re so cheap, I’ve been buying extras).

I’ll be using a repurposed gallon sized pickle jar for this, which means I need to find a way to get an airlock into the lid.

Which I’ve already gotten started, and will show how in my next post. :-)

The Re-Farmer

First!

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Among the things we chose to plant for our first garden since moving out here were Yukon Gem potatoes. My view when it comes to planting potatoes is, since they are so inexpensive and easy to find in the grocery stores, we’ll choose a variety that are not available unless we plant them ourselves. Yukon Gem are a yellow flesh variety that is supposed to be more resistant to disease, and are good for both fresh eating and storage.

We only got 6 pounds for our first try, so we’re not expecting to have any to store. At least not for long! :-D

The biggest thing we did differently, though, was to use the Ruth Stout method. When my mother had her garden in this location, she had my dad or my brothers to plow it for her, every year. She had a working tiller (we’ve got 4 or 5 lying about, and none work), and 5 kids to help pick rocks.

While the area did get plowed before we moved here, no one’s been picking rocks for ages, and the plow job was a bad one. So what we’ve got to work with is rock hard soil, full of rocks, and very little equipment. The traditional method of growing and hilling potatoes was simply not manageable.

Among my recommended posts is a Canadian gardener who tried the Ruth Stout method in his own garden. He sowed his potatoes on top of hard, grassy ground, covered them with a thick layer of hay for mulch, and at the end of the season, he had lots of potatoes, and the ground beneath was greatly improved.

I figured it was worth a try!

We didn’t have hay, so I used straw from the bale we got last fall. What we don’t use to cover our septic tank gets used for mulch, and we still have plenty left this year. Mulch was already a big part of our plans to improve and amend the soil.

Well, the potato plants seem to struggle through the mulch, and never got really bushy. They did bloom, however, and at one point I dug around under the mulch to see if I could get some baby potatoes to try.

Even though this was after a rainfall, and the straw was damp, the ground beneath was bone dry. The only potato I could find was the mushy seed potato.

So… I was beginning to think this was a write off. I don’t know if it was because I used straw instead of hay, but it seems like the straw absorbed all the moisture, and it never made it to the soil.

While going through the garden over the past few days, I’ve been watching the potatoes. Some of them have already died back completely.

This morning, I decided to dig up the 3 potato plants that had died back on one end of a potato bed.

After moving the straw, there wasn’t much to see.

That is the seed potato, and no sign of any others. Only after digging, did I find one tiny potato under this plant.

It wasn’t a complete loss, though.

A few others were visible once the straw was moved, and they were looking pretty good.

Time to carefully dig around with the potato fork and see what I could find.

The first thing I noticed was how different the soil was. Even with plenty of rocks to dig around, the soil itself was much, much softer. I even found worms, as well as a single slug. :-D

So even if we don’t get a lot of potatoes out of here, we will have at least improved the soil!

How many potatoes did I find?

Here they are! Our first potatoes!

I’d say these were from 3 plants but, really, they’re from 2 plants. You can just see the itty, bitty potato that I found by the seed potato of the third one.

Of all the larger potatoes, one had a hole in it from a bug. The rest were solid.

I’m rather pleased! After what I found earlier, I was really wasn’t expecting to find much of anything.

Now to think about how to cook them for supper this evening. :-) I’ll likely make them very plain, so we can get a sense of how this variety tastes, compared to what we usually have.

I’m really looking forward to them!!

The Re-Farmer

Follow up: frost damaged squash

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It’s a good thing we started so many squashes, and ended up transplanting them as such different times. The ones that sprouted later and got transplanted later got missed by that last frost of the season, and have been quite prolific. A couple of frost damaged ones in the first bed, both zucchini, recovered enough that they got quite large and are producing green and yellow zucchini for us.

Others…

They’re still working in it.

Some have started bravely blooming, putting out flowers bigger than their leaves!

With the tiniest of yellow zucchini!

I finally remembered to get a picture of the back row. The plants with the bamboo poles marking them are all ones I have been able to confirm as the birdhouse gourds. I put bricks or rocks under some of them, to support the weight of where the leaves are growing out, as the stems are a bit long and gangly.

You can see a pumpkin mound to the right of centre in the background, and way at the far end are the squashes from the second planting that have done so well.

While there were very few squash to collect this morning, there are so many new flowers right now, and lots of pollinators, so I am expecting a second wave of squash to harvest, soon.

I am looking forward to having enough to make more of the quick pickles!

The Re-Farmer

Sad beets

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While doing my rounds this morning, with my usual checking of the garden beds, I decided to try and harvest some of the beets.

Our poor, sad little beets.

I could tell that a deer had visited last night, as pretty much the last of the larger beet greens are gone. I had been looking at them while doing my rounds yesterday evening, thinking about how they were the only ones left, and now they’re gone, too!

Of the three varieties, the dark red Merlins have managed to survive the most, and have the biggest beets. This is the bed furthest from the spruce grove, and the one that had the last of its big leaves eaten last night.

The yellow Boldor variety seemed to be a favorite of the deer! As you can imagine, they aren’t very big. In fact, some of the ones I picked are so small, I’m not sure they’re even edible. I’m not sure, but I don’t think they have a developed flavour at that size. I’ve never tried to eat beets that small, so I really don’t know!

The Chioggia, which is supposed to have alternating rings of purple and white inside… I was able to pick only three of them.

It’s looking like most of the beets are a write-off.

But at least we’ve got lots of sunburst squash!

Yesterday, I was going to try cooking in the fire pit, and had prepared things in foil packets. It was way too windy, unfortunately, so I just baked the packets in the oven. With one of them, I’d cut sunburst squash, and all 3 kinds of zucchini, into similar sized chunks. After tossing them in olive oil and seasonings, I wrapped them in several layers of heavy duty aluminum foil, sealing them tight. After baking them for half an hour at 350F, I cut open the foil, added dollops of butter, then put them back into the oven until fork tender. They turned out very well! I think they would have turned out even better, cooked over a fire.

Among the things we’ve learned since moving here is, when we do set up a permanent outdoor cooking area, we will have to make sure there is shelter from the wind! It’s frustrating to have a wonderful day to cook outside, but not be able to do it safely because of the wind.

As for the beets, I’m not sure what to do with them. There are so few of them to work with!

Any ideas or suggestions?

The Re-Farmer

How does the garden grow?

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Check out this sunflower!!

It’s just towering above the others! I figure it’s getting close to 7 ft tall. :-)

There are a couple of others that are getting really tall, too. Like this one.

You can really see the huge seed head developing on this one – and it should get much, much bigger!

But… something’s wrong with another tall one. It’s head is gone?

Nope.

Just fallen over.

It looks like some sort of grub got in there.

This is actually above my head, so I am seeing it better now, in the photo, than I could while looking at the sunflower. The head is still alive, so I’m hoping it’ll survive. It’s the only one that has this.

While going through the squash and harvesting some – the sunburst squash is very prolific! – I spotted an odd looking squash and took a closer look.

This green, bulb shaped squash is a sunburst squash! It looks completely different from all the others on the plant.

I left it, and look forward to seeing how big it gets, and if the shape changes. :-)

The girls and I have been talking about what we want to plant next year, and sunburst squash is definitely staying on our list!

The Re-Farmer

What shall I do with you, today?

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Zucchini and sunburst squash I gathered this morning.

Yesterday, I made a sort of hash, first browning potatoes, cubed small, in butter, then adding leek and frying until softened. I cubed sunburst squash, a green zucchini and a grey squash (the lighter coloured, kinda striped, kind of zucchini; our grocery stores label them as grey squash). Once those were cooked until soft, I added seasonings and maybe half a cup of whipping cream. It turned out awesome!

I’m out of cream, though, so I think I’ll just pan fry them in butter with leek.

The Re-Farmer

Our first haskap berries

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I was out doing my rounds a lot earlier than usual, though I skipped tending to the kittens for later. My husband needed to go into town to get his blood work done – something that has been postponed several time already – and we were planning to get there for when the lab opened.

Of course, since I had something scheduled in the morning, my brain decided that sleep was not going to happen.

Yeah. I was up all night.

It turned out to be a gorgeous morning. We were at 9C! (48F) It was absolutely wonderful!

Not wonderful enough to make me a morning person, but I did appreciate it. :-D

One of the things I made sure to check was our haskap bushes. The flowers in the bed around them have grown high enough to almost completely hide the bushes, even though I made a point of pulling up anything growing near the haskap. In time, the haskap will be taller than the flowers, but that might take a couple more years.

I was sure the female haskap had died last fall, but it has recovered remarkably well. I had noticed a couple of flowers, and then some berries forming, so I wanted to see how they are doing.

There are actually 2 berries here; one is still green, and is hidden by the ripe one. In another spot, I found a couple more berries, one ripe, one green.

It looks like that’s all we’ll get this year. Which I am happy with, since the alternative would have been trying to find a replacement female plant, and I just haven’t seen them at all in the garden centres this year. I had hoped to get 1 or 2 more female plants anyway (the ratio for pollination on these is 1 male for every 3 females), but there were none to be had.

That’s okay. Next time, I want to order them from Vesey’s instead. I think I’ll get better quality plants from them.

Until then, I am happy with our bitty baby berries!

The Re-Farmer