It grows a little every day!!!

It really seems like the broccoli grows everyday. It just keeps getting more and more Huge!

The tomato plants seem very healthy, all except one plant, that is curling it's leaves all the time, whether there is moisture or not. I am thinking about pulling it out, but I only have 8 plants and that will leave me with 7. It has a few fruits on it,but they seem to have stopped growing, they have been there a week and still are the same size. I have to admit, this plant has looked funny from the beginning. I am going to keep an eye on it a while longer, and then I may decide to pull it. We'll see.

Last night we pulled a tiny potato plant that had turned mostly brown. I think Mick was disappointed in the low volume of harvest, and the toughness of the potato. we pulled 4 decently sized spuds from one rather small plant. It gave me dreams about digging out huge potatoes and harvesting ripe tomato, but unfortunately that was just a dream!

I Know that I am supposed to allow the spuds to cure and let the skins harden for storage. I have my store bought bag of spuds on another shelf, and the home grown ones are lying on a paper towel. I have already tasted one spud from a previous plant I pulled out. It was about the size of the bottom tater above.......but I fried it and that really prevented me from tasting it's actual flavor. With these I would like to maybe just bake them, so we get the full flavor.

I am still wondering (very much) if I have made some critical mistake with fertilization if all my veggies (minus tomato) taste a bit off. Then again, I planted store-bought sprouted spuds, and that is a BIG NO-NO!

I will update, once I have tasted these little guys. I am promising myself I won't dig any more out until they are completely died back ...... and adding that soil late in the season, did nothing. Too little, too late! And I really don't quite get the whole mulch thing, spuds did not continue to grow all the way up the plant and they were always covered with straw, (if not the soil I added later). It helped to harbor slugs, and I had a hell of a time with flea beetles......hmmmmmm!!??!!

So, If I don't end up with a lot of food, I will know why.....but if I didn't have "food for thought" we would know that something went VERY, VERY wrong!

Until Next time! :)

Garden Tasks Ahead

Well, there is so much to do in the garden that is just waiting on me to get out there....I thought I should make a list so nothing is left undone. I figured what is better than a rainy day to figure out what you want to do?

1. Till and amend soil for strawberry patch. Build bed, plant and mulch. Layer.
2. Clear, and build beds for Blueberry Bushes. Amend soil and acidify. Plant, and mulch.
3. Weed tilled area for cherry to be replanted (if it lives), plant and mulch.
4. Turn compost and begin disassembling and reassembling compost bins.
5. Weed, prune, train and mulch black raspberries. Remove and give away suckers.
6. weed, and contain blackberries. Layer.
7. clear, till and amend soil for red raspberries. Layer.
8. MULCH, MULCH, MULCH, MULCH, MULCH!!!

Those are the major projects......

Here's the scoop on the veggies.

So far it seems the broccoli grows everyday, and the tomatoes are not far behind....

No carrot sprouts yet, but they are notoriously slow germinators, and I used the $.10 seeds, so I am just crossing my fingers.

We have been picking peas everyday, to keep the plants growing...but I have decided that I really do like garden peas, so next year I will plan better. The peas that I am growing were actually meant to be a cover crop, and they germinated so slow that I ended up just letting them stay in place with the potatoes.

We planted some bean vines to fill in the chainlink fence next to the hops and they have spouted and appear to be growing pretty well. But they could also use some compost and straw mulch.

The Potatoes are mostly flowering, and I actually picked a few of the above ground fruits off, because I didn't really know if I should allow the plants to waste energy maturing them. I have never grown potatoes successfully and I am trying each and everything once, just so I will have the expirience under my belt and to give me something to contemplate; successes and failures.

So far, these potates have flea beetles. But they don't seem to be doing too much damage.

I am trying to "hill" the potatoes with straw, because it seemed like a really clever trick, (or so I have read), but that seems to encourage slugs. The smallest of the plants are the ones that seem to be sprouting spuds (yes, I check them.....) But the larger ones do not. I have considered pulling back some of the straw and adding more soil, but I don't really have soil just laying around!

Again, I think next year we will do things a bit more organized. I am very excited about the prospect of homegrown potatoes, as that is a tuber we all love and can use a lot of. Although they are relatively cheap, I still find it really cool to grow my own....well, when I really learn how!!!

There are tons of methods for planting potatoes. I used the straw method. There is also the hill method and a oft overlooked tire method. Whatever works for you.....I am still waiting to see if this is going to "work" for me!!! I hear potatoes grown in straw hills have fewer and smaller tubers, but since I have no comparison, I won't know they are smaller! Besides, they were sprouted store-bought russets anyways!!!

Today I fertilized the Asparagus bed and the tomato/pepper bed. But the rain stopped me from getting much else done......more later!