Sunday, 12/14/14

Veggie garden area with large sweetgum and smaller persimmon trees growing at the edge.  Were we totally hardcore gardeners, I suppose we'd cut down the trees growing so close to our garden so their roots would not grow into the garden beds, but we are "tree huggers" and just put up with the tree roots stealing nutrients from the beds.

High, thin clouds late morning and for most of the day.  South wind increasing.  A new cold front nearing.  Should arrive Monday.

A full schedule of fall shows; meant we did no fall garden housekeeping.  Jo took advantage of a nice winter afternoon to clean up the asparagus and corn beds.

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Sunday, 12/14/14

Sweet Potatoes

A light freeze is predicted for this weekend, so it's time to dig our sweet potato crop.  They say the potatoes will rot if left in the ground for very long after the tops freeze back.  I don't really know if that is true or not.  We always dig when a freeze is predicted or right after the green tops are nipped by a freeze.

Jo is removing wire row covers so we can get to the bed.  It may look as if she's dancing, but her arms are wrapped around a welded wire tunnel.  The way the sweet potato vines are trimmed back to the wire shows why the wire covers are necessary.  Rabbits and/or deer would feast on the green sweet potato vines if they were not covered.

We had a mediocre sweet potato harvest this year:  A little over 47# from thirty feet of garden bed.  There was quite a bit of rodent damage, but there always is.  I don't know how to fence out mice and voles.

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Sweet Potatoes

In the Garden: July 27, 2014

"Fallow" bed.  Contains a few old cabbages, a few dill plants (our dill did not germinate and thrive well) and some volunteer zinnias.  Also, sprouting buckwheat, a cover crop Jo just planted a few days ago.  (We plant dill because it is a favorite host plant for black swallowtail butterflies.) 

Corn:  Last year at this time, I was lamenting that our corn was just now tasseling because we'd planted so late.  This year, it's not yet even to the tasseling stage.  Pretty soon we will be growing fall corn.  The only problem with that is:  In a (more normal) hot and dry summer, the corn won't produce much -- or, maybe, nothing at all.

Potato Digging Day:  Bed before digging.  Potato plants have died back.  Volunteer coreopsis is doing well.  I'll try to dig around the flowers and save as many as I can.  Native bee pollinators visit them often.  Unfortunately, a bloom on the end of a long, spindly stems makes capturing their visits in a photo difficult.

Red potatoes produced well, but we harvested almost no Yukon Golds.

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In the Garden: July 27, 2014