Windy Washday

I know it seems improbable, but this is the first Monday (which is my laundry day) of the season that it hasn't been rainy or foggy or so damp I couldn't hang my laundry out on the lines.

Today has been super-sunny with low humidity but . . . WINDY!

Even the towels dried zippy-quick.  The only trick was keeping the pieces on the lines from wrapping around each other in a tangled strangle hold. 

The wind hasn't been very kind to all the little plants in the garden though.  They're taking a beating from the nearly constant 25 mph winds.  Although perhaps it would be worse if they were taller and hit with more of the brunt of the wind.  It's been blowing steadily all day long, and we've had to chase any number of items as they've been blown across the acreage.  One of our newly built chicken (gosling) tractors even got flipped over on it's side.  Luckily all the goslings were out roaming the pasture at the time.  Sure hope the wind dies down soon.  I don't relish the thought of listening to it all night and wondering what is being blown to Timbuktu.

On a sad, serious note, we did have a severe storm blow through the area last night.  Although we had been warned of damaging hail, heavy rain and high winds, most of it went west of us, and we only had an average rainfall.  Some forty miles from us, many trees blew down, roads washed out or were impassable because of the blowdowns.  Unfortunately, one man was killed when a huge pine came crashing down, and two others (a man and a boy) in a different location were seriously injured.  Yes, it was a bad storm, and we feel so fortunate it missed our immediate area.

I have to confess I was a very Nervous Nellie as we sat up way past our usual bedtime listening to the local radio station and waiting to hear the storm was not going to hit us directly as had been forecast.  It's a helpless feeling when nature brings such destructive weather your way.

Why Do I Hill My Potatoes?

A kind reader asked why it is necessary to hill potatoes.  It's a good question and one I've heard asked many times.

Potatoes (the tubers we eat) grow very close to the surface of the soil in which they are planted.  Even though they may have a thin covering of soil, the sunlight that gets through to the forming tubers causes them to develop solanine.  That's the green coloring you sometimes see on potatoes.  And which is toxic to humans in large doses.  (That doesn't mean if I come across a green spot on one of my potatoes, I toss it in the compost.  Most likely I'll cut the green area off and use the rest of the potato.)  But generally speaking, finding potatoes that are green because of the solanine is not a good thing, and renders the potato inedible according to most potato growing experts.

Be aware that the toxicity of solanine affects some people more than others so you do not want the potatoes you grow in your garden to become green.

How to avoid this?  By hilling your potatoes.

Hilling keeps the light away from your developing tubers.  Potatoes form close to the surface of the soil so you want to "bury" them to a good depth.  Also, the more soil you pile around the plants, the more the formation of tubers is encouraged.

When I plant my potato eyes (or sets as they are also called) I go down the row of tilled soil with a broad hand hoe and make a furrow a couple of inches deep.  I place the eyes in the furrow about 12" apart, then using the hoe again bring soil from each side of the furrow over the eyes making a slight mount which I tap down lightly with the flat side of the hoe.  That's all I do until my first hilling.

You can grow potatoes without hilling.  This can be done by planting your potato eyes in a trench at least 7" or 8" in depth and then covering with soil leaving a slight mound on top of the row.  This method, to me, entails much more work both when planting and harvesting (and produces a smaller yield).  When harvesting you literally have to dig down into the (often compacted) soil to get to your potatoes.  If you hill by pulling loose soil up over the growing plants, you harvest the potatoes by turning over the looser soil which is much easier.

You can also grow your potatoes by placing a thick mulch of straw up around the potato plants in the same way you would the soil.  There are two advantages of using this method.  1)  You don't have to "dig" the potatoes at all at harvest time.  You just pull the straw away to gather the potatoes.  And, 2) the potatoes are much cleaner than if they were grown in soil.

Over the years, I've experimented planting my potatoes in both straw and soil.  Each time I've done this I've found the straw mulched potatoes yield only 50% of the quantity of those grown in the soil.

When is the proper time to hill your potatoes if you choose to grow them that way?  (Or when do you pile more straw on the emerging plants?)  Check five different sources on the subject and you'll find five different recommendations.

Although my plants got away from me this year because the rain and muddy soil kept me from working in the garden, I like to do my first hilling when the plants are small . . . about 6" high.  I nearly bury them in the soil I bring over them.

Then my second hilling is done again when the plants are showing approximately 6" more of growth.  The final hilling is done about two weeks later, although by this time the plants are so tall that I have a hard time finding more soil between the rows to use, and it's also hard to keep the soil from falling right back down the steep slope now formed up to the top of the plant.

Other sources say to do your first hilling when the plants are 8"-10" high and a second and final hilling 2-3 weeks after that.

As with so much of gardening, you have to experiment to see what works in your particular soil and climate conditions.  For instance, if you can get potatoes to grow well using the mulch method, what a joy to have clean potatoes straight out of the garden, but if you have a wet year, the mulch makes a desirable environment for the proliferation of slugs, slugs, and more slugs.  (Slugs which will dine voraciously on your potatoes!)

This information certainly isn't meant as "the-end-all-be-all" of why or how to hill potatoes but rather my personal experience I have to offer after many years of successfully growing potatoes.  

Just don't ask me how to grow a full-sized, red, ripe tomato up here near the tundra!

Rows in the Garden

Today was another great day.  Not as warm as yesterday, not as sunny, but no rain.  (That's coming tomorrow and Sunday.)

Knowing more precipitation is on the way, I pushed to get as much done in the garden as I could.  And, boy howdy, do I feel it tonight.  I made a simple dinner of hamburgers, 'cause that's about all I could handle.   Now I've had my shower and am in my jammies already at a smidge after 7 p.m.

First on my list of garden tasks today was to get the three potato rows hilled up.  The row on the right are Burbank Russets.  They were the tallest and I had trouble pulling the dirt up around them as much as I wanted.  In the middle are Red Chieftans.  They poked through the soil at the same time as the Russets but haven't gotten quite as tall.

The third row over on the left was planted with potatoes I had left from our crop last year.  I don't even know what variety they are, other than a nice red potato, as they were originally given to us many years ago by a farmer friend about 100 miles south of us.  The harvest they gave us last year wasn't up to expectations so I purchased the two new kinds to try this year besides the old regulars.  I didn't think my old seed potatoes were ever going to come up but, of course, they finally did.  I plan to keep track of the harvest we get from each variety this fall.

These are our June bearing strawberries.  (Which don't bear up here until July!)  They're looking very healthy and have been covered with blossoms, some of which are nickel sized green berries now.

I plant my shell peas on either side of the cattle panels I use for trellises and their tendrils are just now starting to reach up and grab onto the trellises.  It seems they've been slow growing this year.  Or maybe I'm just too eager.  As usual.

Those three bushes in the foreground are the haskap berry bushes.  They're four years old this spring and certainly do grow faster than blueberry bushes.  (Blueberry bushes are behind and then our raspberry patch at the far end of the picture.)  Last year was the first year the haskap bushes produced any amount of berries . . . which the robins enjoyed before we realized what was happening.  (Grrrr!)

This is what the very unripe berries look like right now.  They're about 1/2"-3/4" long and won't get too much bigger but will turn a dark blue like blueberries.

The blueberry bushes have more blossoms on them than we've ever seen.  I can hardly wait for breakfasts of fresh blueberries and cream.  Or fresh strawberries (or raspberries!) and cream.  To my mind, that's the real breakfast of champions!

A Totally Sunny Day -- Wow!

Today we put in more work on clearing the area for the new waterfowl winter quarters.

Papa Pea did more chainsaw work.

We ended up with a nice pile of to-be firewood for next year.

Dear daughter was chief in charge of the shredder/chipper operation.  She then took wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow into our little orchard and spread a lovely, heavy mulch under each fruit tree.

What did I do all day?  Sat on the deck and drank iced tea.  It was a great place to be because that ol' sun shining down all day was really HOT!  

Okay, I confess.  I actually didn't sit on the deck all day.  Because our daughter was here to help with the clearing operation, I got to spend the whole day in the garden.  I got the raised beds completely weeded and some planting done in the field garden.  

I think everything in the garden grew a couple of inches with the heat and sunshine after all the rain we've had.  My big pumpkins (planted under hot caps) look to have sprouted nicely, but no show yet for the small pie pumpkins.  Maybe tomorrow?

If it doesn't rain overnight (and it is supposed to be clear -- fingers crossed), I should be able to hill up the potatoes tomorrow.  I'm way late on doing that because of all our rain and our tater crop is going to suffer if I don't get it done PDQ!  

Happy Face, Sad Face, Happy Face

Putting on the happy face because I was able to take our very first lettuce harvest of the season yesterday!

I suppose it would have to be called "baby leaf lettuce," but it was welcome and yummy all the same.  Also plucked the first of our radish crop from the wet soil.

Putting on the sad face because Papa Pea started cutting down a cluster of nice birch and shrubbery.  It made up a view I've always liked.

He had good assistance from our "summer intern" pictured above (aka dear daughter) who is helping us out a couple of days a week this summer.

Putting on the happy face because the clearing is being done to make room for the construction of a winter house for the ducks and geese.  This is desperately needed and I won't miss the trees when the waterfowl are comfy and cozy all winter long.

Changes, changes.  Nothing stays the same except change.  It's all good!

A Bright, Sunny Day? Pthffftt!

I was so looking forward to the sunny, warm day forecast for today.  The plan for getting a satisfyingly fantastic, huge amount done in the garden was ripe and rarin' to go on my schedule.  The time spent outdoors was going to be so welcomed after our couple of days of rain and grayness and gloom and perfect biting bug weather.

Isn't gonna happen.  The day has dawned without a trace of sunshine, it's very cool and I'm afraid to venture out to see how bad the bugs are.  The weather report is now for "mostly cloudy" today and heavy rain tomorrow.  The inch-plus of rain we had in the rain gauge yesterday morning has made the soil soggy wet, and it seems like today's weather won't help it dry anymore than yesterday's dampness did.  Ugh.

This early summer weather of ours has been very wet and cool.  Great, I suppose, if I had planted an acre of peas or lettuce or spinach for market.  But even those cool weather crops need some sun for growth.  And of sunshine, we've been sorely lacking.

No problem.  (Grump, grumble, snarl.)  I can occupy myself quite well, thankyouverymuch, with tasks to be done other than in the garden.

One job will take me into my husband's workshop (aka my seedling starting center -- thanks to the kind, patient, sharing man I live with) starting broccoli and cabbage.  No, 'tis not for a second planting but rather this season's first.  I found out last year that if I didn't plant these particular veggies until around the first of July, I tricked the dreaded white cabbage moth which lays eggs in the plants which results in (ish-eeuuww-I-can-hardly-stand-to-think-of-them) worms at harvest time.  With this timing the broccoli and cabbage aren't available hosts at that particular cycle of the moth.

Also because some of our red and green cabbages get stored for the winter in the root cellar, when they are planted early and mature earlier, our root cellar isn't cold enough for good storage.  It took me many years (yes, bona fide slow learner here) to figure out this method which seems to work quite well.

Last year I put the broccoli and cabbage seeds directly in the garden soil and had only about a 50% rate of germination.  So this year I'm planning it so that I'll start the seedlings inside and have sturdy little, pampered, reared-under-grow-lights plants to set out in a couple of weeks.

Now I just have to mentally overcome another day of heavy, gray, cool weather and make the best use of my time.  But who knows?  Maybe the folks who don't seem to be able to reliably forecast the weather will be wrong (again!), the sun will come out accompanied by a warm breeze, the black flies will refuse to venture forth out of their dark, hidey-holes and I will be able to work in the garden.  This time of year, there's no place I'd rather be.