Sleet and Potatoes

Enjoying more harvest ...
 
It's cold and blustery outside today  here in N.W. Ontario; the wind is up, sleet, rain, and chilly by any standard for September 22nd.
"Yes, dear,   I am,"  I say, being fearless,   " I am going out to dig potatoes" -- choosing the worst possible weather in the process of course,  as we mutually observe.

" I know what,"  suggests the smarter half, who is coincidentally and  smartly canning tomato sauce --and even more smartly,  canning spaghetti sauce and creating other wonderful tomato products in the nice warm house instead of being outside in the sleet, --- "perhaps you could wait for a warmer, more sunny day."  An astute observation it is.
  Yes, the sky is black and ominous. Sleet.  Memories haunt the mind. 
Maybe I'm just getting edgy here, like I do every year.  Change of seasons and all that. "Lack of winter preparedness" syndrome.    Little wonder.  A few years ago we received two feet of wet snow October 1st. With  new whacko-weather smacking everyone,  why can't it snow on September 22nd too? 
Surprise. It can, and it does.  See above,-- sleet, ominous black sky and all.
I procrastinate, warily keeping one eye on the sky. The clock is ticking. 
 

She doesn't object strongly enough, so to save face  keep my promise,  I reluctantly shut down the computer and bravely get right out there wearing  a worn out hunting jacket  sophisticated high-society  potato-digging outerwear and mitts  insulated leather gloves, the heavy ones.  And a toque. The weird Canadian hat with built-in hat-head,  that's the one.   The wind is blowing.  Welcome to Canada.  I pull the collar up, pull the toque down over the ears. It is cold.  I survey the spud-patch.
 Four rows. Four long rows. 

Potato plants are funny things,  they turn partly brown when they freeze, but they don't really get serious about getting all brown or falling over until it's  wet, cold  and sleeting. Like today.  Why is that? You'll see.
It's an annual gardening conundrum, you can pull potato plants while the sun is shining and warm. Filch a few baby potatoes.  Shirt-sleeve warm. Nice potato digging weather. The plants are still strong and green, give'em a yank, and up come potatoes.
 "Look at that, is that a potato?"  *truth be known, it's...the size of a marble.  The small kind. Mini-micros.
"eh"...*sigh   How can that be??
 "They're not finished growing" would be the right answer. Not ripe.  That's why knowledgeable gardeners wait impatiently.  The juice in the leaves and the fat green parts of the plant are food energy, supposedly to be stored in the potatoes readying them to become  healthy, vigorous 'seed' for next year.   Surprise, in between times we interrupt Momma Nature's cycle. We dig'em up and bake'em, boil'em, mash'em, broil'em.... Pity the poor volunteered potato. We digress. 

No matter..we lurked  about, all summer, watching potatoes grow, ....until today.   Now it's cold and wet.  It's  late. Isn't that just the way life is?

 Now the potato plants are down and brown and soggy from the sleet and rain.

Potatoes brown and heading down in bone-dry soil

Everybody knows they break off. The ground is hard as rock, having been so dry--until last night, that is.  It rained and softened the top inch  a bit. It's not mud  yet, but soon would be if it  sleets, and rains a lot more.  The potato stems are soggy, but  topsoil is barely damp even while it's raining. Underneath it's still dry as a bone and yes, hard as a rock. Explain that one.

The Big Dig
With sleet and rain and cold inspiring the gardener, do the potatoes come out just pulling the plant?  Of course not!  The soggy stems  break off instead.  Loyal gardening readers could have won a hot baked potato or an onion betting on that one.     Now I have to dig for them.  Tool selection.   Fork? Shovel? Pick axe?   No matter which tool, some potatoes invariably get poked, stuck, chipped, bonked,  or sliced in neat pieces, almost ready for lunch.  

We have three different potatoes; Kennebec, an early white potato, Gold Rush, a white potato,   and Pimpernel, an heritage red-skinned, white-fleshed  late-season potato.

Pimpernel:  a red-skinned heritage potato

 Note the potatoes are even deformed because the ground is so dry and hard!

A sample of New Potatoes:   "Gold Rush"

Dig, dig....Is that a potato? Nope, it's a rock.  Keep at it.  Garden forks work better in hard ground, even digging for rocks.

Dig dig... Aha!....We do find a real potato. One potato.

a new  "Kennebec" potato--a BIG one.

  
I jest.  Actually I dug up a lot of potatoes.  Just like these.   Some real biggies too, I must admit...I wonder if the cookware back in the kitchen is big enough.   
The rows are still long.  I lean on the fork. Saved by Momma Nature again. The sun is starting to come out....coffee time.
 

Is that Incoming I hear?

A Heap of Garden Updates

Remember the"heap" gardening experiment last year?

A rather simple concept it began; piling up garden trash in the same place every year, burying it at the very bottom of the heap, which is covered with a soil layer.  The decomposing organic matter composts in place, enriching the soil with earthworm castings and micro-nutrients.
The growth potential is no less than amazing,  here's what the "heap" looks like now!

The Heap 2012

And yes, it is HUGE, at about 12 feet wide and 20 feet long.  We have Hubbard squash, cantaloupe, cucumbers, and Spaghetti squash all growing on the heap.  Hm..a few pumpkins too.  Imagine that. Flowers everywhere, some like this one.

Squash? Pumpkin? Cantaloupe?....  I know, a flower!

It seems that even with the strange, even weird weather, the garden is proceeding along just fine!
 The garlic is high,  see these scapes? Straightened out, some of them are over five feet high.
          Although garlic scapes  are wonderful to eat in stir-fries or salads,  I'm letting these  super- scapes ripen so I will have a new supply of bulbils  to propagate more of  this specific garlic.  When the florets develop bulbils, and ripen, they will be harvested and dried for a couple of weeks. The small bulbils can be planted this fall,  a couple of weeks after harvesting. 

Very tall Garlic Scapes

Let's look at the spuds!  We have four varieties,  all hilled up nicely, aren't they?  The plants look small, but the hills are huge.  Quite a change from the soggy spring mud isn't it?  Nary a weed in sight, too! Well, almost! Looks like more work sprouting!

Four Varieties of Spuds growing in the Fog

We have four varieties of spuds planted in this patch.  See? It's right  beside the heap.
 "Gold Rush", "Yukon Gold",  "Kennebec" and an old Heritage white potato variety called "Pimpernel". Last year we bought 2 lbs of "Pimpernel" seed potatoes as an experiment and  ended up with a wheelbarrow full of potatoes.  We saved some of the seed to replant,  and this year we have two long rows-- happily growing.

Sweet corn in the foggy morn seems to be doing fine too--the leaves on this corn are unbelievable, over 4" wide!   It, too, is growing happily.  No wonder, it is heavily mulched. Last year this same variety, by the end of the growing season, had  reached close to  8' tall. 

Sweet corn doing just fine! 

Off to the beanery we go, where purple and yellow beans grow.  Not a weed in this heavily mulched intensive-grow style bean bed!  Beans are ready to pick!

These are yellow wax beans;  the Purple ones  are way down  there.....

Let's hop on  over to the tomato patch.  As you can see, it's a jungle!

Tomato Jungle

A compact, prolific Heritage tomato plant   "Sophie's Choice"

  One of our  most interesting experiments this season  is a  Heritage tomato variety named "Sophie's Choice".     It is a prolific tomato,  a very compact plant--and has, at last count, at least a dozen good-sized tomatoes on it.  Curiously, one is already beginning to ripen.   We will be saving seeds from this amazing tomato plant as the tomatoes ripen on the vine.  It seems to be a determinate type, unusually efficient, compact, and happily,--- a  very early variety.    We have to wonder if the ongoing progressive  ripening  as opposed to ripening en masse caused this amazing  tomato variety to fall out of favour with commercial growers.  Their loss, our gain.

Well, that's  about it for the garden update except for the carrots, cabbage, tomatilloes, Swiss chard, lettuce, onions, peas, dill, zucchini,  novel pumpkins -and THE turnip.  
Yes, we only had ONE turnip sprout. It's growing quite happily.   Go figure.  ONE seed out of a hundred.  Maybe Uncle Mac   who has all kinds of weird stuff happening over at the shed  can get Farm Girl to explain that one!

For our resident gardener dedicated to all things beautiful  I have to add one of her favourite garden things, a spotted lily.  Know why?

Spotted Asian Lily

She graciously took the photo of this pink Calla lily for me.    
 We really needed this special picture for our friend Glory Lennon, the brilliant gardening zeitgeist over at Glory's Garden.  I hereby offer,  as promised...a  pink Calla lily, and yes, we grew it, not in the garden, but in a pot, right outside the door!

Calla Lily            photo by  w.l.kukkee 2012

  Kind of short, isn't it?  Here at Incoming Bytes we all know that with all things growing,  both beautiful and good things come in small packages!


Is that Incoming I hear?