Rescuing Baby Birds

It's that time of year again. Time when wildlife rehabilitation centers everywhere are flooded with "rescued" baby birds. Unfortunately many of those birds didn't need to be rescued at all. So what do you do if you find a baby bird on the ground?

The best thing for any baby animal is to try to reunite it with its parents. They can always take care of that baby much better than any human can.

A lot of times when people find a baby animal, they're actually completely fine. Their parents are out foraging and they're just waiting for them to come back. A lot of mammals like deer and rabbits do this. As long as the baby isn't in immediate danger, like near a road, or where cats or dogs can get it, it's best to leave them alone.

A baby bird found on the ground might need some help, though. The youngest baby birds are called "nestlings", and they definitely shouldn't be on the ground. These are birds that haven't gotten their adult feathers yet, so they may be covered only in down, or even naked. Once they start to get their adult feathers in they are called "fledglings", and start to take some practice flights out of the nest. They're still not good fliers at this point, and it's very common to find them on the ground after they've been practicing flying.

If you find a nestling on the ground, it has probably fallen out of its nest. If you can find and get to the nest, you can just put it back. Don't worry about the parents rejecting it because it has human smell on it. That's an old wive's tale. Birds don't have a good sense of smell anyway, but even mammals won't reject their babies like that.

If you can't get the baby back in the nest, you can try making it a new nest. Secure something like a small cardboard box or basket up in the tree, as high up as you can get it. Put the baby in there. The parents will be able to find it and take care of it from there, and at least it won't be on the ground.

Fledglings usually can be left alone, unless they're in immediate danger of being eaten by a cat or something. Then you can try the same thing: put it back in the tree, where it will be out of reach of predators.

Take the bird to a wildlife rehabilitation center as a last resort. Like I said, during spring, they are inundated with perfectly healthy fledglings that have been bird-napped by well-meaning humans thinking they needed help. (And even if the bird is not healthy, there's not a lot they can do besides give it food and water and a cage safe from predators and see if it recovers. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.)

Whatever you do, NEVER EVER try to raise the baby yourself. The wildlife rehabilitation center I used to volunteer at had a few birds there that were permanent residents because people tried that with them. They ended up imprinted on humans, and with bone deformities caused by being fed the wrong foods and getting nutrient deficiencies. Most baby birds that people try to raise themselves just die from improper care.


Yesterday was a very windy day, and that evening when my husband got home, he was holding a baby white-winged dove our cat had found in the yard. Doves build very flimsy nests that often get blown out of trees. The baby was just getting adult feathers in, but still fuzzy on its belly and head. It seemed strong and healthy, so we decided to get all the cats in, and put it under some bushes near where it was found.

This morning, it was still there running around on the ground where it was still vulnerable to cats. Time for Plan B, making it a new nest. My husband got out the ladder and strapped a plastic bucket lid to the highest branch he could get to. He filled it with leaves for padding, and put the baby in there. It seemed much more happy and relaxed when it saw it was back up in a tree. It perched on the edge of it's "nest" and went to sleep. I'm sure the poor little guy got hardly any sleep last night.

About an hour later I went to check on him, and there was an adult dove in the "nest" with him. Mom was back! The baby looked so happy to be reunited with Mom after his scary ordeal. Mom has been going back and forth ever since taking care of the baby.


Update: Well, I'm sorry to report that the little guy didn't make it after all. We had been watching the "nest" with the binoculars, and today (Sunday) we hadn't seen him peek out all day, even though the parents are still hanging around. My husband got out the ladder to check, and he had passed away. Baby birds have a very high mortality rate so I shouldn't be too surprised, but I'm still sad this one didn't beat the odds.

Looking back, maybe we should have built the "nest" immediately instead of leaving him out there in the bushes another night, so next time this happens (and there will be a next time), we'll do that. But other than that I think we did the right thing to give him a chance at survival.

Black Swallowtail Caught in the Act

A few days ago I caught a Black Swallowtail (Papilo polyxenes) in the act of laying eggs on my parsley in the herb garden.

I don't really mind too much, just like I don't mind the Giant Swallowtails (Papilio cresphontes) on my lemon tree. As long as there aren't too many of them, I don't mind sharing. I have a lot of parsley growing.

I don't know if it shows up on the picture that well, but here are the eggs. Little yellow dots scattered here and there on the parsley.

People love butterflies, but I think they often forget about the caterpillars they start out as. When a person sees a caterpillar eating a garden plant, their first reaction is to kill it. Now, I don't like it when caterpillars completely decimate my garden any more than the next gardener, but I do try to hold off on the bug-killing unless they're really causing serious damage. I plant a lot of parsley and never come close to eating it all myself, so I don't mind sharing.

I'm reminded of an article I read a little while ago about how Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) are having trouble finding enough milkweed, because milkweeds are usually killed by farmers and gardeners, being a weed and all. The article recommended to plant milkweed to give the caterpillars something to eat. I think milkweed is pretty cool looking, especially Antelope Horn, but I understand that it's the kind of plant most people would not consider pretty. It's certainly no Texas Bluebonnet or Indian Blanket.

People like butterflies, but butterflies come from caterpillars, and caterpillars need something to eat. That means you need to have their host plants (and they're usually very picky about host plants), and then you need to have the caterpillars eat the plants. If a gardener doesn't like the host plant, they're probably not going to have it in their garden to begin with, and if they do like the host plant, they probably won't like letting a caterpillar eat it.

But that's what you have to do if you want butterflies.

The Bluebonnet Moon (and Easter)

Oops, I was so busy with Easter preparation that I forgot about the full moon last week! My family has gotten into the pattern of my parents-in-law hosting Christmas, my sister-in-law hosting Thanksgiving, and I host Easter, so I was busy last week getting that ready, in addition to it being Midterm time at work.

Of course, out in the garden, it's a busy time as well. March and April is when Texas switches from Not-Summer to Summer, and Not-Summer crops are being harvested while Summer crops are quickly being planted before it gets too hot.

Again this year there are a few bluebonnets growing in the front yard, and not as many as I'd prefer. I forgot to add more seeds last year, so maybe I can do that this year. Some of them are already getting pods on them, so we're being careful not to mow them down until the seeds are mature.

In the back garden, I'm still waiting for a lot of the cool-weather plants to finish up, though as I showed you in the last post, the beets and carrots are pretty much done. The fava beans are looking lush and have a lot of blooms. We got 0.1 in. of rain on Easter, and hopefully will be getting more this coming week.

The celery (on the right in the picture) is still small, and I think it's going to stay that way. I've been harvesting leaves and stems from it anyway, even though they're not much bigger than parsley. They still add celery flavor to dishes that call for finely chopped celery, even though they would not be suitable for anything that needs nice big crisp stalks. On the left you can see the shallots, which seem to be doing well.

The peas are about waist high now. They have about two months before it gets too hot for them. I hope I can get some peas by then. Nothing like homegrown green peas.

The arugula is covered with seed pods. I'm going to have plenty of arugula seeds to trade and give away.

The garlic and kale are still looking just so-so. I've been able to harvest a little bit of Tuscan kale, but I am really doubting I'll get a good garlic harvest. Next time I really need to plant them in a better spot than up under this tree.

The front garden is just about done! I ended up making four 20' x 4' beds, with 3' paths between. I've decided I like that better than the 5' wide beds and 2' wide paths I did in the back. That turned out be a bit crowded, especially when the plants were full grown. Eventually I'm going to redo the back garden and widen the paths.

The front garden has all my tomatoes, tomatillos, and eggplants in it already. Now I'm working on transplanting the peppers that survived the winter from the back to the front. Here are the Lemon Drops. All of them survived the winter. In the back I'm only going to plant the peppers I'm saving seeds from, to make them easier to isolate from the other peppers.

We've also been planting things in other areas of the yard. Over Easter weekend, my husband worked really hard on our hedge of fruit trees along the front by the street. Now we have (in order from lower left to upper right in the picture) Wonderful Pomegranate, Meyer Lemon, Satsuma Orange, Key Lime, Gold Nugget Loquat, and the fig (unknown variety) that my in-law's gave us. The citruses should start bearing fruit by this winter. I'm not sure how long the other trees will take, but I'm sure it will be worth the wait!

I've also been planting more herbs, including this catnip (left) and catmint (right) in the shady area of the herb garden. First we just put wire cages around them, but some cat figured out how to pull it up and wriggle underneath, managing to eat half the catnip plant. So now we have these rocks around the cages to make that harder. I don't mind giving the cats catnip, once the plants are big enough, but I learned my lesson about leaving catnip unprotected. The cats end up eating it up so quickly it can't grow back and eventually dies. The idea behind the cages is to protect the main part of the plant, while letting the cats eat the parts that eventually grow through the cage. The cats just need to be patient!

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.

Once a Month Cooking

Even though this blog is mostly about nature and gardening, cooking is an important part of that as well. After all, if you're going to be growing a bunch of organic heirloom vegetables (or getting them from a CSA or farmer's market), you need to know what to do with them, right? And eating is one of the most important ways we are connected to Nature (whether we like it or not). But I do admit that it's not always easy, and grabbing some fast food or processed food is something I still do more often than I'd like.

Even though I like to cook, there are still a lot of times when I'm just too tired, or busy, or stressed, and find myself standing around in my kitchen at 6:30 pm completely stumped on what to make for dinner. I tend to get low blood sugar easily, and once I'm in that state, I find myself staring blankly into the pantry or fridge with absolutely no ideas coming to mind, no matter what ingredients we happen to have in stock. "OK, here's a little bit of leftover pasta, the CSA brought more mustard greens, here's a few frozen tilapia fillets, and a pear that's getting kind of mushy..." and it's like I'm in an episode of one of those cooking competition shows where they give the contestants a bag of random ingredients and they have to whip up a gourmet meal from them in 30 minutes. That's difficult even when your mind is clear, which is of course the point of the show. Now try to do that when you are tired, cranky, and dizzy from low blood sugar. At this point I usually give up and this is where the fast food or processed food comes in (or a local restaurant, which is probably better food, but also expensive).

Spring Break was last week, and while I was on "vacation" I decided to try something I've been wanting to try for a while: Once a Month Cooking. The premise is to have a "Big Cooking Day" once a month on your day off, and spend all day cooking a bunch of meals and freezing them. Then on days when you don't have time to cook, you can just take out an already prepared meal and heat that up. Essentially, you're creating your own convenience food. Instead of pulling out a Stouffer's frozen lasagna and heating that up, you pull out a frozen lasagna you made yourself a couple of weeks ago (maybe even one with homemade tomato sauce from tomatoes you grew yourself, grass-fed beef from a local rancher, etc.). It's also supposed to be more time-efficient to prepare a bunch of meals at once than cooking one meal a day. Usually things are made in double-batches, which doesn't take much longer than a single batch, ingredients are bought in bulk (which saves money), and several meals are made that all use that ingredient. While one thing is baking or simmering, you can work on preparing other things. It's an idea mostly targeted at working moms, but I don't see why men or people without kids or people who don't work outside the home wouldn't benefit from it too. After all, if the goal is to save time and money, everybody would like to do that.

Besides saving time and money, it can save me brain-power when I'm hungry. Instead of staring at a fridge full of ingredients and having to think of how I can put them together to make a meal for tonight, I just decide between the meals that I already cooked back when I was clear-headed, and mindlessly follow the directions my previous self so helpfully wrote on the package in Sharpie for my current zombie-like self.

Another advantage that may come as a surprise to you: I sometimes just don't feel like cooking. Yes, I generally like cooking, but like with many things, my enthusiasm for cooking waxes and wanes. Sometimes I'm in a cooking mood, and happily flip through my collection of cookbooks, Penzey's catalogs, Cook's Illustrated magazines,and printed out internet recipes thinking of all these yummy things I can make in the coming week. Then a couple of days later I'm burned out on cooking and even though I have all the ingredients I need for some dish and the time to do it, I just don't feel like it.

So a good strategy would be to cook as much food as possible when I'm in the cooking mood, freeze it, and then it will be there for me when I'm burned out on cooking, ready to just heat and eat.

There are some disadvantages to OAMC. For one thing, not all foods freeze well. Creamy things (like alfredo and bechamel sauces) tend to separate and curdle, while pasta and potatoes tend to get mushy. To get around this, you can either leave those dishes out of your OAMC routine, or you can leave out the un-freeze-able ingredient and add it on the day you use the food. For example, if you're making some kind of dish that's served over pasta, just make everything else but the pasta and freeze that. That way on the day you want to eat the food, you just have to make some pasta to go with it, which isn't that hard. Even in my low-blood-sugar-zombie state I can boil a pot of pasta.

Another disadvantage is space, but I have a chest freezer. If you only have a freezer above your fridge, you just won't be able to make as much stuff at one time, though you might be surprised just how much you can cram in that little freezer. Plus freezers operate more efficiently when full.

Then there's the containers. As a tree-hugger, I got a little worried seeing how many disposable containers these OAMC people on the cooking websites and forums were using. They seem to use tons of disposable foil baking pans, and countless Ziploc bags. Is there a better way?

I decided I'm definitely not using the disposable baking pans, which are sold in packs of 3 for $1. Instead, I went to Dollar General and bought a bunch of cheap steel pans for $1 each. If I use each of them more than 3 times, they've paid for themselves, and I suspect I'll manage to use them more than 3 times each. I'm sure they won't last as long as a nice, high-quality baking pan, but I think this way I'm still saving some money and some waste by using these pans instead of the ones you can only use once. (And yes, I have tried to wash and reuse those foil pans before and it just didn't work out.)

I've not yet figured out a way around using a lot of aluminium foil and gallon-sized Ziplock freezer bags. On the other hand, this might just be a trade-off. Processed food has it's own negative environmental impact, and also comes in tons of plastic, so if my OAMC food is replacing that, it still might turn out to be a better deal for Mother Earth. Maybe some of those freezer bags can be reused a couple of times.

I also haven't tried the "cook all day" thing yet. I actually spaced my Spring Break cooking out over a few days, where I spent more like 3 or 4 hours cooking. I'll probably have to try the all-day cooking thing this summer when I'm busier and more tempted to eat fast food after 6 straight hours of teaching summer classes. That would take better planning, but would be more efficient to get it all done in one day. It might also be easier after doing more casual freeze-ahead cooking before that so I have some practice.

Of course, the lazier way to do this is whenever you cook something that freezes well, cook twice as much and freeze the rest. I'll definitely be doing more of that from now on, but I think I might have to do some power-cooking as well to keep the freezer stocked.

The last reason why I haven't tried this sooner is because most of the OAMC recipes I've seen so far (mostly from Food.com) seemed so heavy. I've already known for a long time that enchiladas, lasagna, shepherd's pie, meatloaf, and all kinds of stews and gooey casseroles froze well, and most of the OAMC recipes I was finding were recipes for that kind of stuff. And that's nice but what if we want lighter fare for the summertime? What if we're watching what we eat? What if I'm sick of ground beef in everything?

What made me ready to go for it was finding the website Once a Month Mom. I was amazed that they have sections on there for all kinds of diets: gluten-free, paleo (which is a sort of low-carb diet), vegetarian, and whole foods. That's more like it! Some variety!

You can pay for a subscription where you get detailed menus and instructions on how to adapt the recipes to OAMC. Otherwise you just get links to recipes online from other sites, and you have to figure out how to adapt them for freezing, though they do give you general tips on how to do that. I think I know enough about cooking that I can figure it out for myself. I just like how they gather all these freeze-able recipes together in one place, and how there's things you can freeze that I just wouldn't have thought of on my own.

So here's some of the things I cooked last week that are now in the freezer. I'll admit I didn't really branch out that much this time, and mostly cooked things I was already familiar with, and they did mostly turn out to be a lot of comfort foods. Next time I'm going to be more adventurous, especially as the weather gets warmer and gooey casseroles are not going to seem as appealing.

When making food ahead of time, you don't have to actually make the entire meal, you know. Here a pot of black beans simmers, while sitting next to them is a batch of Italian Meatballs that just came out of the oven. I also made a big batch of refried pinto beans. The beans went into reusable plastic containers and then into the fridge, while the meatballs were baked ahead of time, frozen on cookie sheets, and then transferred to a freezer bag. The beans can be used as a side dish for enchiladas or a burrito filling, while the meatballs can be reheated by simmering in tomato sauce, and put on a sandwich or over spaghetti. The most time-consuming component of the meal is already made, which also happens to be the component that freezes the best.

I also poached two chickens, shredded the meat up, and froze it in more plastic containers. Now I have cooked chicken ready to go for chicken salad, tacos, pasta dishes, and any dish that calls for already cooked chicken, which is a lot of dishes! Again, this still saves me time, because cooking the chicken takes the most time, and now that's done, and cooking two chickens at once doesn't take any more time or effort than cooking one.

Here I'm putting together a batch of Arroz Gratinado. It turns out that two of those cheap square pans I got from Dollar Tree hold the same amount as a standard 13 x 9 inch pan. Perfect! In this particular case, the shredded meat and the Mexican rice were already leftovers from previous meals that I then recycled into this casserole. The refried beans were part of the big batch I mentioned earlier. I used some of it for the casseroles and froze the rest of it by itself.

I also used some of the poached chicken for King Ranch Chicken. See how this works? Now I have some fully-made meals that I only need to heat and eat, besides components for future meals like already-cooked chicken and already-cooked beans I just need to add fresh pasta or veggies to when I have some.

Here are the casseroles ready to go into the freezer. This works great with any casserole that you assemble and then bake to heat it through. You do everything up to the baking part, but then freeze it unbaked, and bake it when you're ready to eat it. I covered them with one layer of foil, and used a sharpie to label them, including the date they were made and cooking instructions. After they were frozen, I put them each into a gallon freezer bag (which can be reused, it's just there for an added layer of protection), and stacked them up in the freezer. I had some baking potatoes around that weren't going to last much longer, so I made them into twice-baked potatoes. The second baking will be done when they're ready to eat. They were frozen on cookie sheets and then put into freezer bags. Mashed potatoes of any kind freeze fine since they're already mushy.

For breakfast, I also froze a bunch of breakfast burritos. Those get completely assembled, and then frozen on cookie sheets, and when hard, packed into freezer bags. I made two batches of whole wheat strawberry banana muffins and froze them the same way. When ready to eat, they're just heated up in the microwave. I'll admit that these don't turn out as good frozen and microwaved as they are fresh (the muffins don't have a crisp crust anymore and the egg in the burrito can get overcooked), but they still turn out much better than store-bought frozen burritos or store-bought muffins.

Next time I'm in a cooking mood I plan on making some lunch burritos. Maybe using some of those beans and chicken I already cooked. I could also make some shredded beef or pork fillings. Extra could also be used for taco or enchilada filling. Enchiladas freeze well, and tacos are easy to assemble if you have meat that's already cooked. Then you just needs some fresh tortillas, cheese, and veggies and you're ready to eat.

When the summer heat hits, I'll probably start making more "dump" recipes. This is a genre of OAMC recipes where you take chicken parts, pork chops, or steaks and "dump" them raw into bags with sauce/marinade and freeze them that way. On the day you want to eat them, you take them out and let them thaw, and they marinade while they thaw. Then you grill, bake, broil, or stir-fry them. This takes a little more work when you want to eat them, but it's still more convenient since at least all the ingredients are already assembled. At HEB they sell these packs of fajita meat, which is chicken, pork, or beef already in marinade that you just grill yourself. They also have pre-marinaded chicken breasts, pork chops, and fish with cooking instructions on the package, for grilling or baking. This is just making those sorts of things yourself. Since I have a garden and CSA, I'm usually good for veggies, but figuring out what meat I want to cook to go with them can be tricky for me when it's time for dinner. Having a selection of cilantro-lime chicken breasts or glazed pork chops or strips of Asian marinaded steak in the freezer could definitely be handy.

Now writing this blog post has made me hungry!

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!

Growing Potatoes from True Potato Seed

The potato seedlings I'm growing from some "Purple Potato Seed" I got a couple of years ago are doing great! This was seed that got thrown in as an extra in an online seed trade. I tried to grow some of them last year, and none of them made it, so I went ahead and planted the rest this year. Honestly, at this point I don't even remember where I got them from.

Now I have more than 50 healthy potato seedlings! And here I was thinking I'd be lucky to end up with just a few.

Most people plant potatoes using "seed potatoes" which are not the same thing as "potato seeds". Seed potatoes are tubers that you cut up and plant, so you end up with genetically identical clones. This is great if uniformity is what you want, but if you want to genetic diversity, you need to let your potatoes have sex.

Planting potato tubers, just like taking cuttings from a plant, is asexual reproduction. Sexual reproduction allows for the genes of the parent plants to recombine into new varieties. Potatoes have a lot of genes to recombine too, since they're tetraploids. That means they have four sets of chromosomes instead of the usual two, so there's even more combinations you can get in the offspring than with a diploid organism (like we are).

In a nutshell, when you let your potatoes flower, have sex, and produce fruits with seeds, each seed is genetically unique, and all your plants are going to be different from each other.

My goal in growing potatoes from seed is to find which of my genetically individual plants do the best for me, and start growing them again year to year, eventually resulting in the evolution of potatoes that actually grow well in my climate. Which is kind of a tall order considering how Central Texas is not potato country at all. Potatoes prefer cool weather and loose, acidic soil, but maybe out of my 50 plants, I'll find at least one that actually does all right in my alkaline rocky clay soil, and can produce a good crop of tubers before May, when it starts to get hot. I can then name my new potato whatever I want and become famous for developing a potato variety just for Central Texas! (Or something like that.)

To my surprise, a week or two ago I noticed that several of them were already producing little pea-sized tubers at the base of their stems! Staying true to what was on the seed packet, most of them are purple, but some of them are other colors, including a pinkish-red and creamy white. There's genetic diversity already showing!

The potatoes are also showing diversity in their leaves. Most of them have nice, big leaves, but a few of them seem sort of stunted, with small leaves. However, some of the small-leafed ones have big tubers growing on them, and some of the big-leafed ones don't. I really don't know what's better, so I still planted them all to give them a fair chance.

Here is one of the yellowish-white ones on the left, and a pinkish one on the right. Also, some of them have lots of little tubers while some have a few big tubers. This is a lot of fun! I just don't know what I'm going to get!

I ended up going ahead and rototilling that plot in the front yard I've been thinking of turning into a garden for a while now. I wanted to plant my potato seedlings ASAP, and there just wasn't room in the garden in the back.

Here are the potato seedlings in the new plot getting watered with a soaker hose. I got another sack of cheap dog food and mixed it into the soil for fertilizer. One thing I noticed while tilling is that the soil in the front yard is much less rocky than the back. I wonder if it will turn out to actually be a better spot for growing things. I just hope the deer don't find them. Potato leaves are supposed to be poisonous, but it probably just depends on how hungry the deer get. I have another bale of moldy hay I'm going to mulch them with.

From what I've read about potato seedlings, I shouldn't expect to get a good harvest this year, but I might get some small tubers I can save and re-plant next year, just like regular seed potatoes. I'm really getting my hopes up since so many of them already had little tubers in their pots before they even went in the ground. Hopefully those will just keep getting bigger.

It's also possible for them to flower and produce another generation of potato seeds, giving me further opportunity for breeding Texas-adapted potatoes.

And I do have the potatoes I planted from tubers in the back: Purple Viking and Red Pontiac. I just noticed yesterday that they're starting to sprout. Both of those varieties are supposed to be better for warm climates, so we'll see. Maybe I'll get a good crop from them to tide me over until my seedling potatoes start giving good crops.