Like Peas & Carrots, Like Peanut Butter & Jelly

Some things just go together.  It's as if they were made to accompany one another.  We like to plant things that pair up on the plate.  Most of the time it is hard to get the seasons aligned.  One example is Pico de Gallo.  Pico de Gallo begins with tomatoes.  It's definitely a warm weather crop.  Then onions and peppers.  We can grow those and store them.  Lime juice.  But then there's cilantro.  We grow tons of cilantro.  One problem:  It is a cooler weather crop.  By the time the tomatoes are coming in, the cilantro has all bolted and gone to seed and become coriander!  We just can't get it all together for Pico.

But there are other things that work!  A couple of days ago, I pulled the digging forks off the wall in the garage and marched out to the garden in the side yard where the potatoes were showing signs of dying back and letting me know it was time to dig them.  Last week we got around 5 inches of rain total, and I was worried that if I didn't get them out of the ground, they would begin to rot.  I did some digging and put right at 30 pounds of Irish potatoes (LaSoda variety) in the basket.  Not a great harvest, but it will suffice.

Right at the same time, I was on my third picking of snap beans - Contender and Blue Lake Bush varieties.  Picking beans is a back breaking job.  Note to self: Next year plant the rows farther apart so that I can roll my bench on wheels down the row when harvesting.  We've gotten several big baskets of beans picked so far, with more coming until the hot weather shuts them down.

If you are thinking like I'm thinking, we have a dynamic duo right there.  Fresh snap beans, new potatoes and butter.  Is there a better combination?  I think not.  Okay, the combination of peanut butter and chocolate may give them a run for their money.

In regards to combinations, we've another for consideration: Bacon-wrapped green beans!  This is a crowd pleaser.  Unfortunately, we didn't raise the pig that donated the bacon.

3 lbs green beans
24 slices bacon
4 TBS extra virgin olive oil
3 teaspoons garlic salt
1/2 cup brown sugar (we mixed regular sugar and molasses)
2 TBS finely chopped rosemary

Get your oven warmed up to 400F.  Bake your bacon for 10 minutes.  Boil water and blanch beans for 1 minute and quickly cool down in ice water.  Put the cooled beans in a big bowl and combine your garlic salt and olive oil, mixing it up good.

Lay out your strips of bacon and roll 10 beans in a strip of bacon and secure with a toothpick.  Meanwhile mix your brown sugar and rosemary and put a teaspoon on each green bean bundle.  Bake for 20 minutes.  Enjoy!

Harvesting the LaSoda Potatoes

Somewhere around February 9th we planted 15 pounds of LaSoda seed potatoes in our garden in the side yard.  It is near the bee hives and you sort of have to be on guard around there.  Sometimes they are in a docile mood, and other times, they'll run you inside.  Remember the 15 pounds we planted.  That will be an important point of reference a little later in this post.

This is the patch that I've been busy amending the soil with plenty of compost and mulching it each year with wood chip mulch.  Over the year the mulch disintegrates and becomes part of the soil.  This area that had once been rock hard with not an earthworm in sight is loose and easy to use digging forks to turn the soil over at the base of the potato plants to harvest.  I usually wait until the plant is mostly dead to harvest.  The plants look mostly dead, don't they?

I took soil samples at the end of last year.  The potatoes last year seemed to grow nicely at first and then the leaves slightly yellowed and didn't grow lush and green to their full potential.  I wanted to find out what the problem was.  The soil test showed that everything looked good, except for sulfur.  The soil is lacking in sulfur and potatoes need sulfur.  So, this year I added sulfur to the soil prior to planting.

Here is a photo of the entire patch harvested.

When the dust settled, literally, here's what we had:

It's a nice haul of Irish potatoes and we're going to eat every dadgum one of them, but I'm disappointed in the yield.  I knew something was wrong right off.  Some plants only yielded one potato.  Most had two.  Some gave us 3.  Essentially, we had the same problem.  The plants all germinated.  Every single one of them.  They grew and then turned a yellowish color and never grew vigorously.  The didn't get overly wet or dry.  The soil test showed everything looked good.

I wheeled our Gorilla Cart to the back patio and let the potatoes kind of dry off.  You never want to wash the potatoes until you're ready to cook them.  Otherwise you diminish their shelf life.

I loaded them in a crate where I'll bring them inside and store them in a cool, dark, dry place.  Let's analyze the yield and talk about it.  As discussed earlier, we planted 15 pounds.  We weighed what we dug up and you can see the total production below.  42 pounds of LaSoda potatoes were pulled from the earth.  We almost tripled what we planted.  Not terrible, but I expected much more.

I looked up to see what the potential yield should be for LaSoda potatoes.  The publication told me that you multiply the weight of the potatoes planted by a factor of 10.  That's how you estimate a good yield in our neck of the woods.  So, we planted 15 pounds.  We should expect approximately 150 pounds of potatoes harvested.  And we got 42 pounds.  Disappointing!

It was definitely a better harvest than last year, but nothing to write home about.  I'll be trying to figure out what we're missing and why they aren't producing like they should,  and what the soil needs.  Don't get me wrong, we'll eat them all, but I am compelled to find out why the potatoes aren't producing more.  There's something missing.

 

The Spuds Are Up!

We planted a 45 foot row of La Soda red potatoes.  The row has 4 potatoes planted (wide) and 34 (long) giving us 136 potato plants.  I planted them as soon as the cuts scabbed over, so the eyes were not well-developed.  It took longer than I thought for them to finally start peeking through the ground.  Here's one just popping out with what looks like the 5 o'clock shadow on my chin growing on its leaves.  My whiskers are becoming more and more white, ha ha!

As they are popping out of the ground, in the absence of rainfall, I try to get out there with a hose and shower the ground quickly to keep the soil moist.

The leaves open and the sunshine does its thing, causing green growth and a happy plant.  Buried an inch beneath the seed potato is a sprinkling of composted chicken litter.  Once those roots hit that, they'll really take off.  Tricia and I have worked to keep the potato bed weed-free.  Every time we walk past it, we pull out weeds.  

In another week, I'll carry wagon-loads of decomposed wood chips and use a pitch fork to spread out a four inch layer of chips on the bed and around each plant.  That will do several things.  It will help the soil beneath the plant moist and reduce the need to water.  It will also act as a barrier to keep the weeds from growing and stealing fertility from the soil.  Finally, the decomposed wood chips become part of the soil, enriching it and adding organic matter.

I think my love for gardening all started back in childhood with Irish Potatoes.  It was 1976 and I was ten years old.  We had just moved from town out to the country.  There was a little strip of land near the neighbor's pasture which allowed the sunlight to shine through the tall pine trees that were on the property.  I moved many pine knots that were all over the land and stacked them in piles.  It was doing this that I was first introduced to the black widow spider.  I was very careful handling the pine knots as they loved to hide on them.  The black widows had a glossy black body with a bright red hour glass shape on their belly.

My grandfather helped me till up the land and Dad ran PVC water line out there.  We planted potatoes among other vegetables.  I can still remember digging up the plants and unearthing beautiful new potatoes.  My Mom cooked them up.  Things always taste better when you grow them.  Forty seven years later and I'm still planting potatoes.  Still in awe of watching things grow and produce a bountiful harvest that you can enjoy at the supper table. 

A Pleasant Surprise

In an earlier post, we lamented about the state of our potato crop.  The plants never grew tall and lush and green as in prior years.  They had a sickly yellowish color for the entire growing season, and they never bloomed.  I drove by other gardeners' potato crops and coveted the health and vigor of their plants.  I had mentioned I have a pretty good idea that I damaged them with the application of too much chicken litter.  Too much of a good thing is detrimental, when it comes to gardening.

It was hard to fathom that I had done this to my crop after it started off so well.  When I would walk outside, I would intentionally avert my eyes from the disaster in the side yard.  Today, I told my wife, "We are going to wait until the late afternoon when the sun casts long shadows and it's a little cooler.  Then we'll harvest what we can from the potatoes.

We started digging with a digging fork.  It's like a pitch fork, but with wide prongs.  It easily digs into the soil.  We lift the plant from the loosened soil and red potatoes dangle from the roots.  These potatoes are the LaSoda variety.  A variety that does well here.

We have a forty foot row in the side yard that I have planted with four plants per row all the way down.  In all, I had 122 potato plants.  They were mulched deep with wood chips to retain soil moisture and prohibit weed competition.  It also aids in mitigating soil compaction.  We worked our way down the row in the late afternoon.  The potatoes weren't plentiful, but they were better than I had anticipated.

At the end of the row, we had a decent amount in the wagon.

If the plants had been healthy, no telling how much we could have produced.  Most plants had two potatoes.  Some had only one and some had as many as five.

I decided I would weigh them.  First I weighed the empty bucket.  It was 2 pounds.  Then I filled the bucket with potatoes and weighed them and subtracted the weight of the empty bucket.  

When I had finished weighing, we had a grand total of 49 pounds of potatoes on 122 plants.  That's almost a half pound of potatoes per plant.  I googled and found that the average yield should be between 1 and 5 pounds per plant.  So a rather dismal harvest, BUT we choose to look on the bright side.  We thought we weren't going to get ANY!

I put them on the curing rack.  They are in the shade and under a fan on wire mesh (hardware cloth).  I'll leave them here for about 10 days and then I'll bring them inside and store them in the dark.

Next year, I promise to be more reserved in my use of chicken litter for fertilizer.  I'm thinking about taking a soil test as well.  We'll see if we can improve the yield next year over this year.

Potato Trouble!

Have you ever done something that you really regret?  Something that you messed up on and you can't fix it?  There's a saying that goes, "You can't un-ring a bell."  Well, the bell has rung and it's a sad note.  The 2023 potato crop is probably going to be a total crop failure.  Was it due to the weather?  Nope.  Was it because of pest problems?  Nope.

It was because of me.  I planted 122 seed potatoes in the ground in the garden in the side yard.  I dug a hole, put a handful of composed chicken litter in the bottom of the hole,  filled the hole with rich compost and then planted the seed potato and covered it with composted wood chips - a nice medium for potatoes to thrive in.

And thrive, they did.  We achieved a 100% germination rate.  The potato plants grew with vigor for about three weeks.  And then...

They took on this sickly, yellowish hue.  All growth stopped.  Some of the potatoes withered and died.  I hate to even look at what's left of them.  When I walk out that way to check on the bees, I avert my eyes.

Here is a potato plant on the end of the row.  It's unscathed.  It looks lush and green like they are supposed to look.

A Post-mortem:  So what happened?  Here are the unsavory details the best I can figure it.  I got the composted chicken litter from the hen house beneath the roost.  It's good fertilizer, but it's "hot."  You must let it cool down some before using.  That's why I remove the top layer and get the chicken litter that's the oldest.  I put it it a big tub for further composting.  

For whatever reason, I must have picked up some chicken litter that was too hot.  I placed it in the bottom of the hole and then put soil on top and then planted the potato in the soil.  All was good for a while... Until the roots from the potato hit the chicken litter.  What should have caused them to jump up with vigor and turn and blue-green, healthy color, instead was too strong.  Much too strong.  It burned the plant, essentially cooking it.

I'll still dig them up and see what we have.  I was looking so forward to eating fresh Irish potatoes with snap beans.  It's one of my favorite garden duos.  I thought we were going to be harvesting a bumper crop of potatoes and I'd be able to use our new drying wagon to cure them.  I realized the truth to the adage, "Don't count your chickens before they hatch."  The Bible says it even better:

Proverbs 27:1 Do not boast about tomorrow, For you do not know what a day may bring.

Oh well, there's always next year's crop!

While Waiting on Our Fall Potatoes to Sprout

Our Fall crop of Irish Potatoes are in the ground.  We used small potatoes from our spring crop for the seed potatoes for the fall crop.  The spring crop has stored surprisingly well.  Firm.  No big growth from the eyes.  Beautiful.

So while we're waiting for the fall crop to grow, we might as well eat some of the spring crop, right?  Here's one of our favorite recipes using Irish Potatoes.  Years ago, I found the recipe for a side dish called Crash Hot Potatoes.  It quickly climbed to the top of the kid's favorite list.  It is simple and tasty.

15 potatoes
4 T extra virgin olive oil

Salt & Pepper

Fresh Rosemary

Heat your oven to 450 degrees.  Boil a pot of potatoes until they are tender, testing with a toothpick.  Put a little olive oil on the bottom of a baking dish and place potatoes in dish.  Get a potato masher and mash down on each potato until it barely breaks open and then turn the potato and mash again.  Drizzle the top of each potato with olive oil.  Add salt and pepper to the top of each "slightly mashed" potato and then put fresh rosemary on top.  Put in the oven for 25 minutes.

We had these for lunch after church on Sunday.  They were so good they made me want to holler.  That's something my grandmother would say if she were still around.

Perhaps by the time we eat the rest of the spring crop potatoes, the fall crop will be harvested.  That would be neat.  Year-round spuds.

Putting Some Stuff in the Ground in August

We march forward toward September and the gradual reduction in temperature and humidity that will be welcomed with rejoicing by yours truly.  The okra continues to produce in abundant fashion.  As I write this, Tricia is 'cooking some okra and onions down' that she'll freeze and we'll use in gumbos throughout the winter months.  Cucumbers, believe it or not, have had a rebound and are producing once again.  

Speaking of cucumbers, I've got to tip my hat to an elderly gentleman who dropped by the house this spring and gave me some cucumber seeds.  They were of the Marketmore Heirloom variety, and I've got to report that they were the stars of the show, producing steadily throughout the hottest of months when my Boston Pickling and Suyo Long varieties faltered.

Anyhow, I planted a few seeds in some seed pots to get the fall garden underway.  Here are some zucchini and yellow crookneck squash:

And here are some spaghetti squash.

In a little experiment, I planted 12 Boston Pickling Cucumber seeds from some seeds I had saved back in 2016.  What do you know?  All 12 sprouted.  We achieved a 100% germination rate on some seeds we saved 6 years ago.  Not too shabby.

Having that all planted, I got out my Vegetable Planting Guide to see what else I could get my hands dirty with.  Well, it told me that it is time to plant Irish Potatoes.  Right now.

Our feed store does not sell seed potatoes for fall crops.  What we must do is save seed potatoes from our spring crop.  I dug through the bin of potatoes and picked out a dozen small red potatoes (Lasoda variety).  All of the potatoes from the spring are holding up good, stored in the dark in a well-ventilated hallway.

You can see that most of them have (at least one) nice eye growing on them.  That gives me optimism that we'll have spuds this fall.  It is always a risk, right?  The choice is, I could eat these 12 potatoes and really enjoy them.  Or, I could put them in the dirt and see if I could multiply a dozen potatoes four or fivefold?

I'm taking a chance.  I won't put them in the cooking pot.  I'll put them in the planting pot.  I'm trying an experiment this year.  Instead of putting them in the ground, we will try our hand at growing them in pots.  The area where I normally plant them is already populated with purple hull peas and blackeyed peas that are about to put on pods.  No room for potatoes out there.

I filled 12 nice sized landscape pots with the rich compost made from the rotted wood chips in our mulch pile.  It's black and moist and teeming with earthworms - a good medium to grow potatoes in.  Once the potatoes are up, I'll dose 'em up with some composted chicken litter.  Another plus is that, if we get an early freeze like the one that killed my potatoes a couple years ago, I can pick up the pots and bring them in the garage and save the spuds. 

Here are the potatoes planted before I put 3 1/2 to 4 inches fresh compost on top.  I'll be watching over the next several days to see when they sprout.

We have rain for the next 5 or 6 days forecast, but once that is past, I'll look to what else I can put in the ground.  I'm thinking it's time for a couple rows of snap beans.  Happy Gardening Fall Gardeners!

Diggin' Spuds

The back pasture around our house and the side yard was once a rice field.  There is an old deep water irrigation well shaft in the woods in the back of the house along with evidence of irrigation canals that transferred water for flooding rice fields from the well head to the fields.  A lot of the land, sadly, has been subdivided and now grows houses instead of food and fiber.

Fields that were once in rice have several things in common.  The ground is compacted, hard and has a hardpan that holds water.  It is almost devoid of earthworms.  The first year we expanded our garden from the garden to the side yard, I knew we had our work cut out for us.  I fed the soil bunches of organic matter, including composted leaves and cow manure and used mulch heavily.

Slowly, the earthworms returned.  Slowly, the ground became less compacted.  I normally plant all our potatoes in this bed and zinnias come up volunteer to beautify the spot.  I alternate blackeyed peas and purple hull peas to set nitrogen and grow protein.  Here is the bed.  I planted 8 pounds of seed potatoes in this bed.  At the end of this post, I'll let you know how the yield was.

Generally, when the potatoes are ready, I use a digging fork.  It's essentially a pitchfork with straight, thick tines.  It is a great implement for turning soil.  I find it the best thing for digging potatoes.  We rake the mulch back from around the base of the potato plant and dig in.

We turn the soil over to expose new potatoes!  You have to dig around with your hands to get them all.  I messed up a few times and stabbed through some big nice potatoes with the digging fork.  They didn't go to waste, though.  We ate them up with fresh green beans.

Digging up fresh potatoes from the soil is a rewarding experience.  The bright, red potatoes contrasted against the dull, brown soil highlights the treasure we find when we dig.  The boys, when they were younger, loved to follow me and dig through the soil to expose potatoes.  It was like digging for buried treasure, they'd say.

One thing we learned early on is that if you want your potatoes to store longer - don't wash them.  We bring them inside dirty and store them in milk crates so that they get air flow through them.  We wash them as we remove a few to cook.

I harvested in three separate days.

The total yield was better than last year, but still disappointing.  Out of the 8 pounds of seed potatoes we planted, we harvested 41 pounds of potatoes.  That's a five-fold increase, so I'm not complaining, but we've had better harvests.  I'll keep feeding the soil.  Next year we'll have a bumper crop!  (That's optimism spoken like a true gardener!)

I Only Have Eyes For You

I was struggling on the title of today's post, but remembered that cool song by the Flamingos, "I only have eyes for you."  That has to be it, I thought.  A friend from church sent us a funny text that said, "Don't tell secrets in the garden.  The Potatoes have eyes, the corn has ears, and the beanstalk!"

We try to plant our potatoes around Valentine's Day each year.  That means you have to get busy beforehand.  I asked Tricia to go by the feed store and pick up 8 pounds of seed potatoes.  We like the LaSoda variety as it seems to do well in our growing zone.  Well, Tricia forgot.  When she went the next day, the feed store was already out!  The early bird gets the worm.  They were out the next week, too.  Finally, another shipment came in and Tricia came home with 8 pounds.  Now, you have a choice here.  These potatoes would be great boiled and buttered and topped with fresh parsley.  Why, I'd eat the whole pot.  But, delayed gratification is where it's at.  Patience is a virtue.

Later this spring, we'll weigh our harvest and will be able to determine if planting the potatoes versus eating them was a good investment.  Anything more than 8 pounds is good, but we're shooting for an abundant harvest.  We'll see how it goes...

The first step is to get out the pocketknife and quarter the potatoes, ensuring that you have eyes on each quarter.  Some of the seed potatoes were small, so I cut them in half or in thirds.

I arranged them cut-side up on trays and counted them.  Unfortunately, I lost count, but I'll count them again as I plant them.  It was over 110 pieces.  That's a lot of potato plants, if they all come up.

I then placed them out in the sun and wind and allowed the cut up potatoes to begin to heal, or as we call it, scab over.  This is an important step.  If not scabbed over, if you plant them, they are more likely to rot in the ground.

Since then, the weather has gotten cold and it's rained several times.  Being that it is so cold, the eyes on the potatoes haven't done any growing.  I think I'm going to put them in the warmest room in the house and see if we can't coax some growth.  When we plant, in a week or two, I'd like the eyes to show some more growth.

Fresh, new potatoes in the spring.  Looking forward to it!

Digging Spuds in the Mud

With a week's worth of rain in the forecast, I figured it would be a good idea to dig up our potatoes.  No sense in letting them get this far and then have them all rot in the ground, right?  When we ran out of room in the garden, I put in a 45 foot bed in the side yard.  Why raise St. Augustine grass when you can raise something on that same ground that you can eat?  The soil, at first, was poor.  Hard and compacted.  Not an earthworm in sight.  Now, after several years of growing potatoes, purple hull peas, blackeyed peas, and squash while incorporating loads of organic matter, the ground is soft, teeming with earthworms and fertile.  The potatoes are mulched with chopped up live oak leaves to suppress weeds and maintain soil moisture.  Once the crop is harvested, I'll turn all the leaves under and prepare for the next crop.

Here is part of the bed I'm talking about.  You can see the potato plants along with a beautiful Lemon Queen Sunflower that grew up volunteer from last year.  No weeds - just potato plants and mulched oak leaves.

Behold the Lemon Queen Sunflower.  How beautiful!  Here is reason # 4532 of How I KNOW there is a God.  Look intently at the center of the sunflower.  Observe the symmetry, the design, the order of the seed head of the sunflower.  It is mesmerizing.  It is like spirals folding into one another.  Design like that doesn't happen by chance!  Just for fun, if I went out and through out seeds, what are the chances that I could create a design like the center of this sunflower?  Slim to none?  Zilch.  Nada.  Zero.  A design like this requires a designer.  Creation like this requires a creator.

I dug up all the potatoes in the lower part of the garden.  We had gotten a lot of rain last week and the thick layer of leaves kept the soil moist and muddy in most places. As I pulled the plants up with garden forks, I pulled up a nice, big crate of potatoes.  Some, however, had already begun to rot in the ground.  Most, fortunately, were good.

As I pulled up the plants to expose the potatoes, I raked the leaves back over the soil.  I wish I would've taken a photo of all the fat earthworms.  A few years ago, this ground was devoid of earthworms.  We harvested potatoes of all shapes and sizes.  Here is one that fits nicely in the palm of your hand - baseball-sized.

Here are a couple that are smaller.  I like to cut these in half or in quarters and cook in butter with fresh-picked green beans.  Perfect!

The key to preserving these potatoes where they won't immediately rot is to NOT WASH THEM.  Lay them out where there is good air flow and let them dry off.  Once dry, bring them inside in a dark location and they will last for a couple months.  I've even been able to keep a few for seed potatoes to plant again in early August.

It wasn't a bumper crop, but six pounds of seed potatoes made more than a ten-fold increase and that isn't counting the potatoes that rotted in the ground or the eight feet row that I still have to harvest.  After a bunch more rain today, I better get out there tomorrow after work and dig the rest of them up!

Taking the Time to Look Around

“And Jesus saith unto him, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.”  Matthew 8:20 KJV

What a beautiful time it is right now!  The temperatures are nice, the skies blue, little humidity, no mosquitoes...  I feel like we're on borrowed time, though.  This doesn't last for long.  We need to enjoy it while it lasts.  Yesterday after church instead of eating lunch at the table, we pulled a picnic blanket out and ate our meals outside under the sprawling branches of a live oak tree.  It was peaceful and comfortable.  Later we held hands and walked around the yard barefoot, taking in the sights and sounds. 

There is so much going on around us.  If you are rushed and not observant, you'll miss things.  In the corner of the northern awning of the barn, I see a bird is building a nest.  She's very nervous, so I can't get too close. 

I zoomed in and it is a momma dove preparing a nest for her babies!  I was worried about her with Ginger, our cat, prowling around.  Sadly, we had some powerful weather blow through, and in the morning, strong winds had blown the nest away.  She'll find a better place, I'm sure.  Keep trying, momma dove.

In the side yard, the Irish potatoes are growing lush, green, and healthy.  In the first mowing of the yard, I mulched the leaves into small pieces and raked them around the growing plants.  They appear to like it.

The potato plants are blooming and I'm sure there are many potatoes developing beneath the surface.  Won't be long before we dig them up.  We're looking forward to some new potatoes cooked with fresh green beans and butter.

We'll be sure to show an update when we harvest.