In the first picture, the potatoes from the wattle weave bed are on the far left. I hadn’t planned on planting potatoes there, and had just shoved the last seed potatoes that didn’t fit in the other bed in there. This bed was different in that, when it was prepared in the fall, it was topped with a mulch of wood chips. I just dug holes for each seed potato through the mulch, leaving most of it undisturbed. Then, a straw much was added on top. To harvest them, I removed the straw mulch and dumped it on the other bed I’d just emptied, but the wood chip mulch got brushed aside. After harvesting all the potatoes I could find, the wood chips and soil got pushed back and levelled off, all mixed together. The wood chips had already started to compost pretty well since last fall, and should break down even faster, now that it’s mixed in with the soil and all the worms and insects I was finding!
The second picture is of all the really tiny potatoes I was finding, plus a few slug damaged ones. They actually look far bigger in the picture than they actually are!
For now, they’re just sitting in their little piles on rhubarb leaves. I’ll figure out what to do with them later!
The Purple Peruvian potatoes should be much easier to harvest. We just need to dump them out of their grow bags and onto a tarp or something. The first time we had potatoes in grow bags, we dumped them into the kiddie pool we had, but that’s got melons growing in it right now. 😄 It’ll be a while before we harvest those. They are only just barely starting to die back right now.
We already knew we liked the Purple Peruvians. So far, we’ve only had one meal with the Irish Cobbler and the Red Thumbs, and we enjoyed them, too. They were cooked together, though. We’ll try them each on their own next, and see how we like them. At this point, though, I’d say both varieties are ones we’d be willing to grow again. When we’re at a point that we can grow enough potatoes to last us the winter, we’ll have tried enough different varieties to decide on two or three to stick to and save our own seed potatoes from.
It’s a beautiful cool day! The weather apps can’t seem to make up their mind if we’re supposed to get rain or not in our area, which means we probably will not, so I worked on harvesting potatoes in the old kitchen garden again.
But first, I sorted through last night’s potatoes.
In the first photo above, I sorted the largest potatoes out for curing. The smaller potatoes are the smaller ones, which I brought in for immediate eating.
Not very many left, that’s for sure!
The Red Thumb fingerlings are split between two beds, and I started on the long, narrow one at the retaining wall. The first thing was to remove the mulch, and as you can see by the second picture, there were quite a few potatoes right on the surface, hidden by the straw.
I was also uncovering lots of frogs! With the cooler temperatures, they were pretty sluggish and snoozing under cover.
In the third photo, you can see all the Red Thumb potatoes I harvested from that bed (almost). They are fingerling potatoes, so I would expect them to be small, but they somehow seem smaller than they should be, for this variety. The yield is very nice, though. My guess is that, with better soil conditions, they would have been larger. Later on, we’ll go back to them and separate out the largest ones, and taken the smaller ones inside to eat right away.
What I didn’t get a picture of, but intend to later, are the ones that didn’t make it to the curing screen. I kept finding the tiniest of potatoes! Maybe the other potatoes had tiny ones that that, too, but I just didn’t see them. These potatoes are so red, I couldn’t miss them! I’m not sure what I’m going to do with them. They’re too tiny for eating. Just washing them would be very difficult. I don’t want to just toss them on the compost. I’m considering finding some out of the way spot and just burying them in the fall. Who knows. They might start growing in the spring, like some of our volunteers, this year! 😁
Once the retaining wall bed was done, I removed the mulch from the others in the wattle weave bed. As with the first bed, there were potatoes right on the surface, too.
Holey potatoes.
Some still had slugs on them.
After throwing away the first few I uncovered, I realized this bed was hit by the slugs quite badly. So I took the ones I’d already harvested and laid them out, then took a break. I’ll be getting back at it after I’m done this post. I hope it’s just the surface potatoes that are so badly damaged, but I don’t have high hopes for that bed’s harvest at this point.
I headed out this evening, intending to harvest all the potatoes in the old kitchen garden.
Instead, I ended up watering things. The peppers and luffa in the wattle weave bed were all drooping. The ground was so wet this morning, I thought it rained during the night, but it turns out it was just dew! Everything was bone dry by the end of the day.
By the time I got to the potatoes, I had time to just do the Irish Cobblers before losing light.
This is our entire Irish Cobbler harvest.
We did harvest some earlier, for our own use and for my mother. I still hoped for a higher yield, but at least we harvested more than we planted, this year!
For now, the box of them are on the picnic table under the old market tent. We are no longer getting predictions for rain tomorrow morning, but might get some by noon, the day after. Tomorrow, I’ll bring out a couple of the screens we have and lay the larger, undamaged potatoes out to cure for a while. The rest will go inside for us to eat right away.
I should be able to harvest the Red Thumb fingerling potatoes tomorrow, too. The Purple Peruvian potatoes in the grow bags still aren’t even dying back yet, so it’ll be a while for those.
Between the three varieties, we should have a decent amount of potatoes to store. It’s nowhere near enough to last us the winter, which is the ultimate goal, but we don’t have the prepared space to grow that many potatoes, yet.
I’m heading to my mother’s this afternoon, then taking her to a medical appointment, so I thought I would bring some things from our garden to her.
I picked the potatoes from under just one Irish Cobbler plant, which had a pretty decent amount of larger potatoes. There were also small ones, so I just buried them and the plant roots again. There’s a few orange carrots, a zucchini we harvested earlier, some Roma and Indigo Blue tomatoes and a Sweet Chocolate bell pepper. While cutting some thyme, I noticed a shallot that got missed, so I grabbed that, then added a couple more we’d harvested earlier. I also cut some spearmint for her. I decided to add one of the Black Beauty tomatoes we harvested earlier, too. The softest one I could find among the lot. After bagging it up, I remembered to grab a head of garlic for her, too.
My mother being my mother, I expect to get a lot of snarky comments and backhanded insults. 😄 She’ll have issues with the brown pepper and different coloured tomatoes. She did ask me to give her some of the tomatoes to try, but then launched into a long speech about how bad it is to have not-red coloured tomatoes. And, of course, she’ll tell me how my sister brought her soooooo much from her garden, and it’s so much better, and she’s just one person, so it’s all too much, and how bad it was for me to bring more.
My mother is very predictable. 😁
But I’m giving them to her anyways. Who knows. She might actually show appreciation for a change. 😄
We did have one really nice, ripe Indigo Blue Chocolate tomato for my daughter to taste test. I’d picked three and put them in my pocket so I could use both hands. One was so ripe, it split when I bent over, so it needed to be eaten right away.
My daughter found them absolutely delicious. Nice and sweet. Juicy, but not too juicy, with a rich tomato flavour. We have others harvested that will need to be eaten quickly, and I don’t think that’s going to be a problem at all! 😄
The Indigo Blues are an indeterminate tomato, so I can expect to be able to harvest small amounts of them more often, from now one. The Romas are starting to ripen in mass quantities, so I might just wait on processing the ones we’ve picked, so we can do larger quantities all at once.
On another note completely, we did try to use the new bread machine yesterday.
Something went wrong, but I don’t know what.
I came into the kitchen to check on it, and it was off. There was still power to it – the display was showing the exact settings I started with for a basic 1.5lb loaf. It should have been showing a count down on the time. It just wasn’t running. The bread dough had been completely kneaded and was just sitting and rising the pan, so I left it. Later on, my older daughter took the dough out and baked it in the oven, so we now have one, perfect little loaf in bread jail to try.
Hmmm… I wonder. We keep our bread in a bin – bread jail – to protect it from the cats. I wonder if maybe a cat stepped on the controls while we were not around, and shut it off? We’ve set the bread machine up on the counter near the microwave, where it could be plugged into an outlet on a different breaker, and plenty of space around it for when it’s hot and baking. It’s the one counter the cats are allowed on, as they like to sit and look out the window.
That’s about the only thing I can think of, other than mechanical failure.
My daughter plans to try again, later, so we’ll see!
Who knows. I might come home to some fresh bread to try. :-)
The first Roma VF tomatoes that showed up are now starting to change colour from green to yellowish and now kinda orange.
I still am not sure how we’ll be able to tell when the Black Beauty and Indigo Blue Chocolates are ready to pick. They practically started out at the colours they’re supposed to be, when ripe. I guess it’ll come down to how soft they feel, and how easily they come off the vine. The very first Black Beauty tomato that showed up is getting quite large, so that’s another thing to use as a guide, I guess.
We also have squash and gourds developing – I hope!
The G-Star patty pan squash are looking big and healthy – the slugs don’t seem to like them! Here, the first flower buds are forming, with both male and females forming at the same time! With everything else, we’ve just been seeing male flowers. There is one exception. We have one yellow zucchini plant that the slugs seem to just love, but it’s surviving. There is a single female flower bud, with a bright yellow baby squash under the flower, but the male flower buds are just barely emerging. It’s unlikely the female flower will have any male flowers to pollinate it when it finally opens.
The second photo is of our very first female African Drum gourd flower bud!
I was not expecting it to be fuzzy.
A few other winter squash are also starting to show female flower buds, including the Crespo squash. Hopefully, the buds will actually reach the blooming stage. With the Crespo squash in particular, the only ones that showed up before now, dried up and fell off long before they got big enough to start blooming. They sure have a lot of male flowers, though! More than any other squash that has started blooming.
It was thundering and threatening rain while I was checking the garden beds, but I went ahead and made a first harvest, before heading in.
I dug around and gathered our first Irish Cobbler potatoes. These are from under 2 plants. There were still tiny potatoes among the roots, so I left the plants in the ground to hopefully keep growing.
I just picked enough for one meal. We’ll leave the rest to fully mature before we pick them again; there just aren’t that many plants, so the longer we leave them be, hopefully the better the harvest in the fall. We’ll likely try the Red Thumb potatoes too, but with the Purple Peruvian growing in feed bags, we’ll probably not bother with those. We’ve grown them before, anyhow, so we know what they taste like.
We had quite a lot of rain last night. Enough to refill the barrel by the sunroom to overflowing! With all the thunder I was hearing while checking the garden, I didn’t start any outdoor jobs. Instead, a daughter and I went into town to refill some water jugs and pick up a few things, including kitten kibble. I ran out of that last night. The storm I was hearing passed us by, though, so we should be able to get at least one of those frames done this evening.
For all that our garden ended up much smaller than intended for this year, I’m happy with how things have been turning out.
Well, the heat is really kicking in. Last night, in the wee hours of the morning, I checked the temperature, and we were at 20C/68F
That was somewhere around 3 – 3:30am
As I write this, it’s past1:30pm, and we’re already at 31C/88F. We are now above the 30 year record high for today, set back in 2015. I’ll still take that over the record low of -3C/27F! We’re getting heat warnings all over the place. Winds are high and we’re looking at possible thunderstorms this evening.
Pain levels were high for me this morning, so the girls took care of feeding the outside cats and setting the transplants out on the picnic table, under the old market tent and sheltered from most of the wind. Then my younger daughter did a fantastic job of cleaning up the branches from when I harvested trees for the permanent trellises we will be building. I just asked for the branches I tossed over the fence to the driveway side to be picked up, but she cleared away the big branch pile in the trees, too! Even sorted out longer pieces that we can potentially use, others suitable for the fire pit, and the rest went into the big branch pile we still have just outside the gate by the fire pit.
She was still working on it, when I finally made my way outside.
I started watering things, before it got too hot, and was able to mostly empty the rain barrel. If we do get some rain this evening, it won’t be enough to need to add the diverter to prevent it from overflowing.
While watering in the old kitchen garden, look what I found!
Our very first potato has broken ground!
This is one of the Irish Cobbler potatoes, which were the first ones planted.
I am very happy!
While watering further afield, I found the Crespo squash was very wimpy and made sure they got a super deep watering. These plants grow very big and, if they survive long enough, are supposed to produce very larger pumpkins, so they are going to need a lot of water. The nearby leaking rain barrel that I filled with a hose still had some water in it, so I was able to use that, while refilling it with the hose, at the same time, to water the raspberries, cranberries and sea buckthorn, too. I filled the barrel to almost half way, and hope to be able to see where the leak is. It may be more than one spot.
Things are looking quite lovely out there! The crab apple trees near the house are in full bloom, and the ones along the north side of spruce grove are almost there. The common lilacs and the double lilacs have sprays of buds that are starting to open. Of course, we have a sea of dandelions blooming and starting to go to seed, but the mowing will have to wait.
There are a few outside jobs that I want to work on, but will have to work around the weather conditions. Thankfully, the days are getting long enough that, if I time it right, I can get some good productive hours in the early morning and the evening. I’m not good with mornings, though! So far, at least, the house is not over heating, but we’re going to have to set up the screen “door” at the top of the old basement stairs, so we can leave the real door open to help cool the house down.
Here’s hoping all this heat and, if the long term forecast for June is at all accurate, rain will mean a healthy garden and a good harvest!
The girls and I are still trying to figure out the best place to set up grow bags for the potatoes, where they would get full sun, but also be closer to the house for watering. We don’t have a lot of the old feed bags left to use as grow bags, so we decided to use one of the Old Kitchen Garden beds that was recently fixed up.
The bed still needed topping up, so I started by adding some of the sheep manure I recently purchased. I didn’t add a lot, as this bed was filled with purchased garden soil, and it should still be pretty rich in nutrients. What’s missing is organic matter. This is a blend of compost and composted manure, so that will help a bit. This got worked in with a rake.
Also… do you see that bit of green poking out of the wattle weave bed?
It’s a stray onion!
I have no idea where that onion came from. This bed had never had onions planted in it.
I’m not going to complain, though!
Next, it was time to raid the garden soil pile and do some soil sifting.
Three wheelbarrow loads of the garden soil was brought over. The weeds are already starting to grow under the cover on that pile!
Some of the Irish Cobbler seed potatoes were very small, so to fit them all in the bed, I put some of the smaller ones together. Then they got buried as deep as I could, so they don’t need to be hilled.
As this area slopes away from the house, the far end of the bed is somewhat deeper than the end closer to the house, to level it off. Still, with this bed being newly rebuilt, and the layers of organic matter below, the top layer of soil still isn’t very deep.
Once the potatoes were planted, I scattered some stove pellets over the top, then began watering. Once the pellets had expanded into sawdust, I used a rake to spread it out evenly. This is not at all for the potatoes, but to protect the soil and help reduce soil compaction. Over time, we will continue to add grass clippings and wood chips as mulch. The potatoes will easily be able to grow through a mulch. With this bed being higher now, and not using straw for a mulch, hopefully, that will reduce the slug problems!
After spreading out the sawdust, I gave it a deep watering, and plan to water it again a couple more times, today. I want the water to go through all those bottom layers that were added, which will speed up their anaerobic breakdown, while also acting as a sponge to retain moisture. Once those bottom layers are good and moist, this bed should not need much watering at all.
This morning I headed into town to refill our big water jugs and pick up a few things at the grocery store. By the time I headed back, our post office was open. I’d checked the tracking last night and knew our Veseys order would be in today, but when I got there, she still hadn’t had a chance to finish processing all the parcels that came in. She found them for me, though – among several other boxes from Veseys that I could see! They are a popular company, with good reason.
For the potatoes, we got a total of 4 pounds each of Red Thumb fingerling and Purple Peruvian fingerling. We really liked the Purple Peruvian when we grew them a couple of years ago, and I’m hoping we’ll have enough to save seed potatoes for next year.
There is also a 3 pound back of Irish Cobbler.
Irish CobblerRed Thumb FingerlingPurple Peruvian
Two of the above images are from the Veseys website. The Purple Peruvian are some of our own harvest.
I can see that the potatoes have already started to sprout. We’ll need to lay those out for air circulation as much as for chitting. I’ll have to go through the old feed bags we have and see how many are left, since we’ve stopped buying deer feed and bird seed. We have too many slugs and not enough garter snakes or toads, to try growing them in the ground again.
Then there was the box with our trees.
Would you look at those mulberry trees!!
I knew they would be small, but I didn’t think they would be THAT small! Normally, there would have been a single, larger, 2 yr old sapling, but they had a shortage of that size. Instead, they sent out two 1 yr old saplings for the same price.
Liberty appleTrader mulberry
The above pictures are from Veseys. Hopefully, in a few years, we’ll have apples and berries to harvest!
Right now, I’ve got them out of their plastic bags and set up in the living room, safe from the cats. I find myself seriously considering leaving them to grow indoors for a year but… well… I don’t know that their chances for survival would be any better indoors than out! We will have to make sure to put a cloche over them when they are planted, to protect them. The funny thing is going to be transplanting these tiny little things with their fully grown size in mind. They can grow 15-20 ft high. This variety is supposed to be hardy to our zone, but winter protection is still something we’ll want to ensure. At least for the first couple of winters.
The apple tree is quite a bit larger! It started raining as I got home, so it might be a little while before we plant it, so I opened the plastic bag and set it up next to the mulberries. I didn’t take it out, since it’s packed in sawdust.
The planting instructions for the mulberry state:
Unless you have heavy clay soil, there isn’t much to do in terms of soil preparation. You can add amendments such as compost or peat moss to the soil and/or a layer of mulch over the root area after planting will help retain moisture, especially during the first year. While it may be tempting to add fertilizer or manure to your freshly dug hole before planting your new tree, PLEASE resist! Fertilizer or manure in close contact with the root system could chemically burn the roots and potentially kill the tree.
Mulberry trees can grow quite large, up to 15-20 feet tall. Avoid planting near walkways and driveways as the fruit will drop and create stains. Mulberries are self-fertile and require full sunlight.
Where we will be planting them, the soil is very rocky and hard packed, and a whole lot of sun, so we’ll be giving them some garden soil to grow in, and plenty of wood chip mulch around them.
It’ll be different for the apple tree. The planting instructions are:
Plant apple trees 5-6 meters (15-18 feet) apart in the spring in a full sun location with good air circulation and drainage. For best results, two varieties should be planted to ensure successful pollination and fruit production. Dig a hole large enough to accommodate all of the roots without bending (approx. 18 inches). Place the tree in the hole with the graft union about three inches above the soil surface. You should be able to see the soil mark on the trunk where the tree has been taken out of the ground, it should be planted no deeper than this. Mix compost with the soil to fill back in the hole once the tree is set in place, and lightly firm to ensure good soil root contact. Water surrounding the tree to ensure good root establishment. Water every two to three days if your season is dry.
It will be planted closer to the crab apple trees for cross pollination, but far enough away to hopefully protect it from the fungal disease that is killing them off. This variety is also a zone 4 tree, which means it will need shelter for the winter.
Hhhmm… I’m rethinking where to plant the apple tree. There are some dead and dying trees in the west yard that need to be cleared out. Better shelter, full sun, and close enough to the ornamental apple trees in the old kitchen garden for cross pollination.
We’ll figure it out. That’s now our job for the day!
Among the things we were talking about ordering that will be delivered in the spring were potatoes and, potentially, raspberries.
It seems we weren’t the only ones that had a bad growing year in 2022, because the potatoes I was looking for were simply not available. However, Veseys has potatoes again, and so I placed another order with them.
Among the items we have ordered before, we are getting the Purple Peruvian Fingerlings again. We were really happy with them, in their grow bags, two years ago. They come in 2 lb packages, so we ordered two of them.
I am also ordering a couple of seed mixes from them that we ordered before (and using the coupon code from Maritime Gardening saved me the shipping costs!). I ordered two each of the Alternative Lawn Mix, and the Western Mix Wildflowers. The areas we had planted them, in the fall of 2021, got flooded in the spring, and nothing came of them. With so many wood piles chipped, we now have areas of bare ground that I would like to seed before they get taken over the invasive weeds again! Two of those areas will get the alternative lawn mix. The third does get accumulated snowmelt nearby in the spring, but should be fine to plant in. That area is next to our budding food forest, and will be good for attracting pollinators.
The seed packs will be sent right away, but the rest will be sent in time for planting in our zone 3.
Here are the new varieties we are going to be getting. All images belong to Veseys.
These are Red Thumb fingerling potatoes. They are noted for their delicious flavour. Unfortunately, there isn’t any information about how well they store over winter. These come in 2 lb packages, so we ordered two of them.
These are Irish Cobbler potatoes, an early variety also noted for their exceptional flavour. They come in a 3 lb pack, and we ordered just one of them.
These last ones are for our food forest. Royalty Raspberries. They come in packages of three, and we ordered just one package to try them. They are a late maturing variety, hardy to zone 2. So far, everything we’ve tried that’s purple has done really well for us, even in poor growing conditions, so I’m hoping the trend continues! These will produce fruit in their second year, so as long as we can keep them alive this year, we should have purple berries to try, next year.
There are still other things we will want to order for spring delivery, such as replacement sea buckthorn. We’ll just have to be careful to set aside the budget for them as we place the spring delivery orders, because we’ll be charged for them all at once, when they’re shipped!
This year, I’m happy to have several items, with different maturing rates, added to our food forest. The raspberries for production next year, apples that should start producing in 4 or 5 years, and the zone 3 mulberry trees that should take a few more years before they begin producing berries, as we will be getting 2 smaller, younger seedlings, instead of the 1 larger, older seedling they normally would have shipped, but are not available.
Little by little, we’re getting to where we want to be!
The Re-Farmer 