Potato, Beet, and Carrot Update

I was worried that my potato seedlings were a loss. A month after planting them, I had only about four plants left, and they weren't looking so good. Something was munching on them (snails?), and they just looked weak and sickly. I was afraid all that work raising my potato seedlings had been wasted.

This is one of the better looking plants! By this past weekend, most of them were gone, and I decided to give up on them, and plant the area with the rest of the tomato plants I had left to plant. Bummer!

I started digging around in the ground to plant the tomatoes, and started finding those little mini-potatoes the plants already had on them. They still looked OK! I decided to gather up as many of them as possible. Maybe this would be a way for my potatoes to get a second chance.

I ended up with about a cup of mini-tubers, ranging from pea-sized to peanut-sized. There were purple, pink, and yellow ones, and some of them were round, while others were long and skinny. It was fun, like searching for tiny little Easter eggs!

I started to do some research online to find out what I might be able to do with the mini-tubers, and found lots of useful info. It turns out my potato seedlings were doing what potato seedlings normally do.

Here is the most helpful thread I was able to find. From reading that, I have figured out that my potato seedlings had already gone into tuber-making mode, probably before I even planted them out in the garden. Despite Tom Wagner saying he can get a harvest of potatoes the first year from true potato seed (maybe in his climate he can, but I don't live in the Pacific Northwest), it looks like most people who grow TPS get tiny little mini-tubers the first year, and then plant the mini-tubers the next year to get full sized potatoes. I knew I would get small potatoes this year, but I didn't realize exactly how small they would be, and expected them to grow at least bigger than peanuts.

So the potatoes weren't a loss! I dug up as many mini-tubers as I could find, and then planted tomatoes in their place. Next I had to figure out what to do with the mini-tubers. The thread I linked to says you can plant the mini-tubers in the garden in June or July to get bigger potatoes by fall. Like with full-sized tubers, the mini-tubers will go dormant for a while before they can sprout again.

The problem is I live in Texas. If I plant these little things in the ground again this summer, I will just end up with mini-baked-potatoes! I've tried to plant seed potatoes for a fall crop before, and planted them in August, and hardly any of them made it. That was with full sized potatoes. I doubt these tiny little babies would fare much better.

I considered storing them, but I wasn't sure how long they would store well for, or what conditions they should be stored in. Finally I decided to plant them in a container, where I could keep them sheltered from the summer heat better, and they'd be in nicer soil. I probably should have grown my potato seedlings in a container the whole time and not even bothered planting them in the ground at all, but I'm learning.

I put some potting soil in a window box I had that didn't have anything in it to about two inches below the top, then sprinkled the mini-tubers evenly over the surface. I covered them with another inch of soil, and will add more soil after they start sprouting so they're in nice and deep. I then watered them well, and put them in the shade.

I'm really not sure what's going to happen to them now. Maybe they will stay dormant for a while before sprouting. I'll keep them in the shade so they stay cool, and keep them moist, and see what happens. I'm in no hurry, I just hope they sprout at all.

Meanwhile, the Purple Viking and Red Pontiac potatoes seem to be doing great out in the garden. At least, their tops look good. I just mulched them deeply with moldy hay.

In other root crop news, I guess the Chioggia beets won the beet variety trial, because they're the only ones that look halfway decent, and I think it's about time I gave up on them. This winter was just too dry, and I should have been more consistent with watering. Here you see the two nice-looking Chioggia beets I harvested, and one Detroit Dark Red. All the rest of my beets don't even have roots big enough to be worth bothering with, and they've been growing for over six months!

I'm going to have to try again next fall and see if I can get them more consistently watered over the winter. Will probably put in some kind of drip irrigation to keep them moist.

The weird thing is, the Danvers Half Long Carrots, which I planted as dividers between the different varieties of beets, seem to have done better than the beets themselves. I picked a nice bunch of carrots! I don't think I've ever had carrots do this well before. Are carrots more drought-tolerant than beets? Maybe I should have done a carrot trial instead of a beet trial after all.

I think I'm going to roast these carrots with the few beets I had and some parsnips from the store for Easter dinner next weekend. I always like to try to incorporate home grown stuff into holiday meals whenever I can. Makes it seem more special.

The Mockingbird Moon

Maybe I should call this the Mountain Laurel moon instead. The Texas mountain laurels have started blooming, filling the air with their sweet fragrance. That means it's officially spring!

I've still got tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants to plant out in the garden. I'm going to do that ASAP. I don't care if they say our last frost date is in March. I really don't think we're getting any more frosts.

In addition to the purple potato seedlings I talked about last time, I planted out my purple tomatillos at the end of the same bed where the potato seedlings are. I had just the right amount of room.

In the back, the potatoes grown from tubers are starting to sprout. It took them a long time, but they're finally starting to poke out.

The beets I planted back in fall still aren't doing that well. They just haven't gotten enough rain, so they're just sitting there hardly growing. I'm really starting to wonder if I'll get a decent harvest from them at all, let alone be able to tell which varieties are best.

The second batch of beets are also still tiny. They only have two or three months left before it starts to get too hot for them.

The celery is also growing very slowly. I've heard celery needs a lot of water, and these just aren't getting much. I guess I need to buy a lot more drip hoses.

The kale and garlic are not doing much either, but at least the cabbage worms are finally gone. I haven't harvested any kale, and I might not. I get kale from my CSA, and the kale I'm growing is doing so poorly I think I might just leave it alone. I planned to save seed from this kale, since I used up the seed I had for this variety. Maybe I'll just leave it alone and let it do that.

Speaking of seed saving, the arugula is starting to make seed pods. The bees really like the flowers too.

The shallots seem to be doing ok. I've never grown shallots before, so I hope they do well. Onions are hard to grow here, so I'm looking for alternatives. Plus shallots are so expensive at the grocery store! I don't think I've ever eaten shallots before.

The fava beans seem to be doing fine. That's another thing I've never eaten before, but they grow during the winter, which is a good time to grow things here.

Some of the overwintered peppers are starting to put out some little leaves, though some look like they have died. I think once I can tell for sure which lived and which didn't make it, I'm going to transplant them into the front yard bed I just made. Peppers are pretty plants and would make good front yard plants.

I went ahead and put up some bird netting over the bamboo tee-pees I put up for the peas. It's not to keep birds away, but to give the peas something to climb on, since they were having trouble clinging onto the bamboo.

Well, spring is certainly in the air! I'm going to plant the rest of my nightshade transplants as soon as I get the chance, and I need to start seeds for some warm-weather things like basil soon. It's starting to become one of the busiest times of year for gardening!

The Cedar Moon

It's the first full moon of 2013, and it's been very warm lately. We haven't gotten significant rain since that good storm we had around New Year's Day, but for the last couple of weeks or so highs have been in the high 70's and low 80's. I wonder if this is going to be one of those years where it's warm in January, and then in February we have an ice storm.

Friday I got my seed potatoes from www.potatogarden.com. I got three pounds each of Purple Viking and Red Pontiac, both varieties that are supposed to do well in the South. Purple Viking was the best potato I grew back in 2010, though it still wasn't that great (I planted 3 pounds and harvested 5 pounds). I haven't grown Red Pontiac before, but it's a Florida heirloom, which sounds good.

Here are the seed potatoes being cut up. The Purple Vikings are on the left, and the Red Pontiac are ready to be cut up next on the right. I cut them and let them dry out for a day, then planted them in the bed that I had a cover crop of Austrian Winter Peas growing in over the winter. I hope that adds enough nitrogen to help them make a better crop this year than the last time I tried growing potatoes.

Here the potatoes are in the bed getting watered. I have another bale of moldy hay I haven't used yet. I plan on mulching the potatoes with that after they sprout, since potatoes like a deep mulch. I hope that also adds more nutrients for them.

My "purple potato" seedlings are also doing really well. These are from the seeds I got in a trade as a surprise. Some of them are growing really vigorously! I tried planting some last year and they didn't do well at all, so I didn't really count on these doing well either. I now have about 50 seedlings. I'm not sure where I'm going to put them.

Here are all my seedlings, including tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. It's been so warm it's tempting to plant some of them out now, but instead they'll have to stay on their pots, soaking up some sun on the porch.

Out in the garden, the Arugula is bolting. It already started to bolt a little during our last warm spell, then it gold cold and it stopped in its tracks, and now it's picking up where it left off.

A lot of other plants look like they've hardly changed from last month. There just hasn't been enough rain for them to grow much. Here I have kale in the foreground, and garlic in the background. I haven't eaten any of my kale because it got eaten up by bugs so much, and hasn't been growing back new leaves very quickly.

The beet trial doesn't look much different either. I've been thinning them some more, and it looks like a few of them are just starting to form round roots. Some of them where the tops are poking out of the soil look about dime-sized.

I planted a second repeat of the beets in another patch, right around when we had our last rain, and they're just now starting to sprout.

I also planted some fava beans when it last rained, and they're just starting to sprout too.

The Tall Telephone peas are just starting to send out tendrils, and I'm trying a new type of support for them this time. I'm trying out bamboo teepees like I use with pole beans. I'm not sure if it will work with peas, since they climb in a different way than beans, but this variety gets so tall, I need something really tall to support them.

The shallots (left) and celery (right) also don't look like they've made much progress. I've heard that celery needs a lot of water, so they probably haven't been getting enough.

After the peppers got all mushy from freezes, I cut them all down to stumps to see if they might survive the winter and grow back in spring. So far it looks like they all have. They are all still green. If they do all survive, I'll have a lot of extra pepper plants since I've already started more seedlings. I'll have to find some people to adopt them out to.

This weekend is Groundhog Day. Down here in Texas it sure feels like it's already spring, and it's still January. I keep thinking of how lush my garden would be right now, if we would only get some rain to go with these warm temperatures.

The Mistletoe Moon

It's the last full moon of 2012. Winter has still been unusually warm and dry. We've had a few mild freezes, but still plenty of days where I could wear short sleeves in the afternoon. We also noticed our water bill went up, probably because I've had to water the garden so much. I really wish it would rain. We have a chance of rain on Monday, so I hope it doesn't turn out to be another disappointment.

The kale and collards are still getting badly eaten up by cabbage worms. It just hasn't gotten cold enough to kill the bugs. It's also too dry for them to grow very quickly to make up for the leaves that get eaten. I'm going to have to buy collards for the traditional New Year's Eve black-eyed pea, collard, and cornbread dinner.

The Red Giant mustard and arugula are still getting eaten but not as badly. I've actually been able to harvest some. I guess this really shows that spicier greens are better defended against caterpillars.

I just planted the celery, which had been in pots. I've never grown celery before, but so far it's doing well. I've heard that celery needs a lot of water, though, so we'd better get some rain soon now that they're out in the garden.

The shallots seem to be doing fine. That's another thing I haven't grown before, so I hope they turn out to be easier to grow than onions, which I've never had much luck with.

The beets are struggling along due to lack of water. Chioggia is still doing the best, but that could be because it's right in the middle of the patch, while Bull's Blood is doing the worst, but it's on the edge. This is why it's better to have multiple repeats of any experiment.

The peppers are finally starting to look wilted after that last freeze. They were going along fine for the first few freezes, but that last one might have been a bit too much for them.

The luffa gourds aren't looking too good either. I was trying to give them as much time as possible to ripen the gourds they have, but they're still green. I doubt I'll get ripe gourds from them.

In the garage I've got my baby nightshades under lights. In the cellpack to the left I've got potato seedlings. I tried to grow some potatoes from seed last year, but they didn't make it once I transplanted. I'm trying again with the rest of the seeds, though I'll probably also buy some tubers. On the right I've got the tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. They'll all go in their own individual pots once they get bigger.

Next I need to figure out what my 2013 Garden New Year's Resolutions will be!

The Gold Moon

Sorry this post is a couple of days late. The full moon was actually Sept. 30. I think traditionally this moon is called the Harvest Moon, the full moon closest to the Autumn Equinox. It's just not very gold out there right now, it's mostly very green. We got lots of rain in September, about 5 inches, so everything is looking very lush and green out there. The weather has cooled down so we're having highs in the low 80's and lows in the low 60's.

The garlic is starting to sprout, but so are a lot of rain lilies that are in the bed with them, so it's a little hard to tell what is what. I planted the garlic in the last bed on the end, which is very close to some oak trees, so I hope that wasn't a bad move. I think after I harvest the garlic next summer I'm going to abandon that bed. Hopefully by then I'll have the old shed taken down and that prime sunny area it's now taking up made into more garden space. (We plan on rebuilding a new shed in the shade.)

I also haven't gotten around to mulching the garlic yet. It's probably OK for now since we've gotten a lot of rain and it's not cold yet, but it's on my to-do list.

The Red Giant mustard is growing bigger, but it's still not very red. Does it need cold weather to get red? You can see some more rain lilies coming up there too. They're so pretty, I just don't have the heart to pull them out. They're hard to pull out anyway because of the bulb.

I've also planted some arugula, which you can see here with another wildflower, purple wood-sorrel  growing up among it. That's another "weed" I don't like to pull up. It gets pretty purple flowers on it and the leaves are edible. A whole bunch started coming up in the yard after the rain.

I also planted kale, chard, and dill plants which have also settled in nicely. Still left to plant are parsley, cilantro, and celery.

The beets are just starting to sprout as well. Don't see any carrot sprouts yet. This year I also planted leek and onion seeds directly in the ground instead of trying to transplant them like I've done before. No sprouts of them yet.

The fall tomatoes are doing OK but still pretty small. I don't know if they'll have time to set a crop of tomatoes before frost. Maybe fall tomatoes just aren't worth it.

The tomatoes that survived the summer aren't looking much better than the fall-planted ones. Still no fruit being set. Maybe in the future I should concentrate my efforts on getting a good tomato harvest in the spring and summer, and just accept that there will be no more fresh tomatoes after July or so.

The basil is doing great. I think I should plant basil earlier next year so I'll have some to harvest earlier in the year (like when I have tomatoes!), but no problem with getting a fall harvest of basil too. The only problem I'm having is pinching off the flowers on the varieties I'm not saving seed from this year fast enough to keep them from cross pollinating with the variety I am saving seed from this year.

Well, another problem is figuring out what to do with so much Cinnamon Basil. I've found a few recipes for it, but most of the time when I do a search for "cinnamon basil recipes", I get recipes that have both cinnamon and basil in them but not Cinnamon Basil.

The luffa gourds are another summer survivor that I'm not sure are going to do anything before frost. I wonder if they are in too much shade? They're on the extreme other end of the garden from the garlic. They have grown up into the Ashe juniper tree that shades them on that side, but even the part that's up there isn't setting any fruit.

The hot peppers are putting out a second crop, but disappointingly the bell peppers haven't. The plants look fine, but no peppers. I feel like I'm up to my eyeballs in hot peppers already, but it would be nice to have some more bells before frost.

The leeks I planted in spring are still there, and I still think that's weird. They still haven't bolted or made any bulbs. They've just sat there all through the summer. I was going to try either saving seeds or bulbs from them but they haven't made either. I think this week I'll try cooking with some and seeing if they're at least edible. I keep thinking they're probably tough or bad-tasting by now, but maybe not.

Lastly, the Austrian Winter Peas I planted as a cover crop in the bed I plan on planting potatoes in are growing nicely, with all the rain. The idea is for them to fix nitrogen in the bed before I plant nitrogen-loving potatoes in there in January or February.

Which reminds me, I still need to plant my edible peas and fava beans, but I've run out of room. This is why I'm a bit annoyed with my tomatoes, bell peppers, and luffa gourds right now. They're taking up valuable garden room, as it becomes increasingly doubtful I'm going to get anything more out of them this year. I wonder if I should go ahead and yank any of them up, or if I should wait until they freeze to death before I plant my peas. Except that might delay the pea harvest, and I'm really looking forward to some delicious, fresh homegrown peas. This winter I want to grow enough peas to freeze some for later.