Garlic and Onion Harvest 2015

The heavy rain we had this spring and early summer wasn't appreciated by all of my Alliums. Some of them did all right, but others had problems with rot. That's why I'm posting about them a bit late this year because some of them had some problems during curing.

All of my garlic and onions were planted on September 21, the Autumn Equinox, last year. I planted three varieties of perennial onions: French Red Shallots, Yellow Potato Onions, and I'itois Onions, five varieties of garlic: Red Toch, Lorz Italian, Inchelium Red, Nootka Rose, and S&H Silverskin, and two varieties of leeks: Elephant Garlic and multiplier leeks.

The Yellow Potato Onions, Inchelium Red Garlic, and Nootka Rose garlic were all new varieties I got from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange.

French Red Shallots

Harvested June 11

I got these French Red Shallots back in 2013, I think, and this the first year I got enough to eat as well as plant (and even give some away to family members). The first year I planted them, a lot of them rotted, but they must have adapted or something because now they are doing great.

They're just like little red onions, with a sweet mild flavor. They're small, about the size of golf balls, but I'm very happy with them, especially when I see the price of shallots at the grocery store.

Yellow Potato Onions

Harvested July 2

The shallots' cousins, the Yellow Potato Onions, didn't do nearly as well. Long after all the other Alliums were harvested and cured, the YPO's and Nootka Rose garlic still looked like they weren't ready. I finally gave up and harvested them anyway, and I found out that a lot of the Yellow Potato Onions had rotted. They are supposed to be easier to grow than shallots, so I emailed Southern Exposure Seed Exchange to ask them what they thought happened. They thought it was because of the wet weather, and said onions especially don't like that.

It's like we either have to little rain or too much! The onions in the picture are the ones that weren't rotted, so I'm going to try planting them again and seeing what happens.

I also grew I'itois onions again, but don't have a picture for them. These are the ones I got back in 2009 from Native Seeds/SEARCH. They did great, as usual.

Elephant Garlic

Harvested May 11

Even though the Elephant Garlic was one of the first Alliums I harvested, apparently I was still too late. As you can see from the picture, all but two of the bulbs fell apart into individual cloves as they cured. Next year I need to remember that Elephant garlic is ready very early, and I'll try digging them up as soon as they send up scapes. This year I cut the scapes and then left them in the ground a while longer, and I guess that was a bad move.

As usual, I got lots and lots of bulbils, as you can see in the picture, but so far I haven't had much luck with growing those. You're supposed to be able to plant them and they grow into larger solid bulbs, that you then plant again to grow into full sized bulbs with cloves. When I've planted them before they didn't come up at all. If I have room I'll try again this year.

The other type of leek I grew again were the multiplier leeks I got from my SCA a few years ago. As usual, they're doing great. They're almost doing too well and are becoming almost like weeds.

Inchelium Red

Harvested May 12

This was my best garlic this year. It's an artichoke variety that I'm trying out for the first time, and I'm happy. It's very similar in appearance to its fellow artichoke, Lorz Italian. I haven't done a taste comparison yet. I got several bulbs of a good size. Don't have much else to say except this one is a keeper.

Lorz Italian

Harvested May 27

I'm still happy with Lorz too. It didn't do quite as well as Inchelium Red this year, but I still got some good sized bulbs from it. It's also a keeper.

Not pictured is Red Toch, which I harvested on May 12. I only got a few undersized bulbs of that one. It's also an artichoke, but Lorz Italian and Inchelium Red are both doing so much better, I've decided to discontinue this variety.

Nootka Rose

Harvested July 2

This is the garlic that gave me the most problems. It's a silverskin that I tried out new this year, to see if it was better than S&H Silverskin. I finally gave up and harvested it in July along with the Yellow Potato onions even though it wasn't ready, and some of these turned out to be rotten too. I'm torn about whether to replant this one or not. There were a couple of bulbs that looked like they might have produced cloves, and the biggest bulbs of this one were bigger than what I got from S&H Silverskin, but it took so long before they were ready to harvest. I like to rotate sweet potatoes after my garlic, because usually my garlic is out by May or June, just in time to plant sweet potatoes, but this year I had to make my sweet potatoes wait for Nootka Rose.

S&H Silverskin

Harvested May 12

I've planted this other silverskin before, but it's never done very well. The bulbs are always very small. I wonder if maybe silverskins just aren't a good type of garlic for me. They're supposed to be the longest keeping garlics, which sounds good, but that doesn't help much when the bulbs are so tiny they're hardly worth peeling.

Summary:
Keepers - Lorz Italian garlic, Inchelium Red garlic, Elephant garlic, multiplier leek, I'itois onion, and French Red shallot
On Notice - S&H Silverskin and Nootka Rose garlic, Yellow Potato Onions - These will all get another chance, but if they don't do better next year, I'll probably discontinue them.
Discontinuing - Red Toch, due to being consistently outperformed by the other artichoke garlic varieties I have in my collection

Even with the failures, I still have plenty of Lorz Italian, Inchelium Red, and Elephant garlic to eat, plus a lot of French Red shallots.

Potato Harvest 2015

One of the things I got done over the July 4th weekend was harvest my potatoes. The tops had mostly died back, and it was getting hot out there, so it was time for them to come out.

Potatoes are difficult to grow in Central Texas. They don't like freezing temperatures, but they don't like hot temperatures either, so that leaves only a small window where they're comfortable in a Central Texas garden. They also prefer acidic soil, and my soil is around pH 7.5 - 8.0.

Therefore, for the past few years I've been on a learning curve figuring out the best way to grow them. I think I'm finally starting to get the hang of it, because this year they did well enough that I have plenty of potatoes for eating as well as saving some for replanting.

I planted six varieties of potatoes this year. Two of them, Red Pontiac and Purple Viking, are varieties I've been growing for several years now, and they continue to do well. I originally got them from Potato Garden. To try out some new varieties, I bought the Cook's Potato Mix from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, which has one pound each of four varieties: Caribe, Cranberry Red, King Harry, and Rose Gold.

I planted Red Pontiac and Purple Viking on January 18. I'm still trying figure out how early is too early to plant potatoes. Most sources say I'm supposed to plant them around Valentines Day, but I have been trying to push that date earlier to make sure they have plenty of time to mature before it gets hot. If I plant them too early, they start to grow a lot, and then if we get another hard freeze, they can get badly damaged. That happened when I tried planting some in November 2013, which turned out to be way too early. Luckily I didn't plant all of them that early, so I could plant some more later in January of 2014 when the first planting froze to death.

Potatoes are heavy feeders, so another thing I tried this year was to really work the soil well and add a lot of goodies to make sure they had plenty of nutrients. I used a modified version of John Jeavons's double-digging method, but without the double part because my soil is too compacted and rocky down there. Basically I dug a trench out from the end of the raised bed, put that in a wheelbarrow, laid the seed potatoes down in the trench, sprinkled some organic fertilizer and compost on top, filled in the trench with soil from the next trench, and repeated the process until the whole bed was planted. The last trench was filled with soil from the first trench. Then I spread even more compost on top. The resulted in seed potatoes about 8-10 inches deep, with very loose fluffy soil with lots of organic matter covering them. It was a lot of physical work, but I think it turned out to be worth it.

One mistake I made was waiting until the potatoes had sprouted and grown a lot of leaves before mulching them thickly with hay. It was still pretty cold and damp when I did that, so pillbugs got under the hay and ate so many leaves off my Red Pontiac plants that they died. I would say about half of them died from that.

I received my seed potatoes from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in early March, and planted them March 7. I treated them the exact same way as the Red Pontiac and Purple Vikings, except this time I put the thick hay mulch on top right away. That way, they didn't leaf out until their stems had grown up above the mulch, and the pillbugs didn't eat them.

All of the potatoes were harvested on July 2, and here are my results.

Red Pontiac and Purple Viking

Red Pontiac and Purple Viking

I planted 20 Red Pontiac plants and 16 Purple Viking plants and they all did great. The fertilizer must have helped, because I don't think I've ever gotten potatoes this big before. I got plenty to eat as well as save some for replanting next year. Even though the Red Pontiacs were damaged by the pillbugs, you can see I still got a respectable crop from them. I planted fewer Purple Vikings, but got the biggest yield from them.

I think Purple Viking is still my favorite potato variety. Red Pontiac doesn't always do as well, but one advantage is it's earlier than Purple Viking, so I'll keep growing both.

Now for the newbies from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange.

Caribe

Caribe

Here's the description SESE gives for Caribe: One of the earliest and prettiest potatoes you'll dig. Deep purple skin with snow white flesh. Can be quite large with good yields. Good for boiling, baking, and frying. Lovely as a new potato. Very early maturing.

Well, they turned out to be the ugliest of SESE's potatoes! They yielded the highest, but the tubers were all cracked and knobby and rough.

But I did some research online and found out it may not be all the potatoes' fault. We had a lot of rain in the spring and early summer, and this can cause some varieties of potatoes to grow this way if they get a deluge of rain while the the tubers are growing. The tubers end up taking up too much water too quickly and the outside of the tuber cracks.

I considered whether I should give this variety a second chance or discontinue it. I didn't really want to eat them because of all the deep cracks full of dirt. This variety might be too similar to Purple Viking to be worth keeping. They're both purple skinned and white fleshed, and PV has already proven itself worthy.

Finally, I decided I will use them in an experiment. I'm going to try fall-planting these for a winter harvest. I've read about how you can plant potatoes here in August or September to maybe get a harvest before our first freeze in November or December. It's cutting it close because you're trying to grow them in that small window between weather that's too hot and weather that's too cold, and sometimes potatoes planted in the hot weather of August rot, but since these tubers are messed up anyway, if they don't make it I won't be too upset about losing them.

It would be nice to get two crops of potatoes a year. I don't really have anywhere good to store potatoes over the summer. You're not supposed to store them in the fridge because that ruins the taste, so the only other place is to put them in my pantry, which is really too warm to store potatoes optimally. During the day when we're at work, the air conditioner is set to 82 degrees to save electricity. Potatoes are ideally stored at 50 degrees. There's nowhere in my house that's 50 degrees in the summer!

So I can't really use potatoes as a long-term storage like they do up north, and instead they're a seasonal treat to be eaten quickly before they sprout or rot. It would be nice to have a second harvest in December because that would be long after the summer-harvested potatoes are gone.

Cranberry Red

Cranberry Red

SESE Description: Considered the best of the red-skinned, red-fleshed varieties. Excellent for potato salad because of its low starch content. Smooth texture and high yields.

While harvesting the potatoes I accidentally cut one in half and noticed the flesh really only has a pink blush. I wouldn't really call it red. This is also the variety that gave me the smallest yields. Besides the cut one, the ones you see in the picture are all I got, and they appeared to all have come from only one plant.

But the potatoes I did get, especially that one in the foreground, were so pretty that I decided to keep all of them to try replanting next year. Why did that one plant do well while the others had nothing? If they had all done as well as that one plant, I would have gotten a lot. Maybe I can get them to do better next year.

King Harry

King Harry

SESE Description: A new firm-fleshed round white potato from Cornell University that holds its shape well when boiled. These early and productive plants have hairy leaves, thanks to a wild potato from Bolivia, which deter pests like the Colorado Potato beetle. Great for potato salads, boiling, sautes and soups.

Of all the new varieties I got from SESE to try this year, King Harry did the best. It's the only one I got enough of to eat some as well as save some for replanting. The potatoes I got where very nice-looking round potatoes with blemish-free smooth skin.

The plants were considerably more vigorous than all my other potato varieties (though I didn't notice the leaves being significantly hairier). It sent out long sprawling vines, flowered profusely, and then made two big handfuls of potato berries for me! It must be the genes from that wild Bolivian potato.

I kept the potato berries to save the true potato seeds from to try growing them in the future. I've tried growing true potato seed before from some "purple potato seeds" I got in a GardenWeb swap years ago, but they never got big tubers. Maybe since King Harry has already proven itself as a good potato variety in my garden, it's offspring will also be good.

Caribe is the only other variety that flowered this year, and it never set fruits, but it might have contributed pollen to the King Harry seeds. I hope so, because that would give even more genetic diversity. It would be interesting to grow these seeds out and see what I get.

Overall, King Harry is definitely a keeper!

Rose Gold

Rose Gold

SESE's Description: Rosy red skin with a creamy delicious deep yellow flesh. Dry flesh is perfect baked or steamed. Disease resistant.

Rose Gold was the second best of the new varieties. It's supposed to be very similar to Yukon Gold, but with with a rosy blush to the skin. It didn't give me enough to eat some, but I still kept the ones I got for replanting next year to try to increase. The tubers I did get looked very nice. I would like to have a yellow-fleshed potato in my collection.

Summary:

Purple Viking - still my favorite
Red Pontiac - still good
King Harry - the best new variety; definitely a keeper
Rose Gold - giving it a second chance
Cranberry Red - giving it a second chance
Caribe - replanting in August as an experiment

I now have several pounds of Purple Viking, Red Pontiac, and King Harry to eat. The other day I roasted some chicken thighs with some of the potatoes that got impaled by the digging fork during harvest, and they were delicious. I like to roast chicken thighs and potatoes sprinkled with herbs like rosemary and sage, and stir it a bit as it cooks to let the fat that melts out of the chicken coat the potatoes and get them all nice and crispy. Mmmm!

It may be my imagination, but homegrown potatoes do taste better than store bought. And they were grown with no pesticides!

The potatoes I plan on replanting go in the spare fridge in the garage. Storing potatoes in the fridge makes them convert some of their starch to sugar, which makes them taste weird, and that's why you don't want to store potatoes you want to eat in the fridge. But if you're going to plant them, then who cares what they taste like? Keeping them in the fridge will keep them from rotting before it's time to plant them again.

Planting them in late January seems to work well. I think I had to cover them with frost blankets a time or two, and I did have that pillbug problem, but I still got a lot of nice big potatoes after doing that.

I look forward to seeing how the varieties from SESE do when planted earlier. When I planted Red Pontiac and Purple Viking in January and the SESE varieties in March, I expected the earlier planting to be ready to harvest earlier than the later planting, but that turned out to not be the case. They were all ready to harvest at around the same time.

At first I thought that earlier planting made no difference, until I dug them up and found out the earlier planting had much bigger tubers. Ah ha! I've made a discovery! The vines die in late June or early July no matter how early they were planted, probably triggered by the hot weather. But if they are planted earlier, they have more time to grow larger tubers before hot weather. So there is an advantage of planting earlier, but not the one I thought it would be.

Sweet Potato Harvest 2014

This past weekend I decided it was time to harvest the sweet potatoes, because it looked like the last weekend we'd have before a freeze. Even without a freeze, as you can see in the picture above, my sweet potatoes thought it was too cold anyway. They're such tropical plants, that even temperatures under 40 degrees F makes them wilt.

My harvest this year was a bit disappointing. Still not as good as what I got in 2010. I'll have enough to eat for the holidays, but not the bumper crop I was hoping for.

I planted slips I grew from three varieties I got last year from Duck Creek Farms: Garnet, Molokai Purple, and Carolina Nugget. I discontinued White Yam because it didn't do well at all.

This year they ranked about the same as last year. Garnet was the best, followed by Molokai Purple, followed by Carolina Nugget.

Garnet/Dianne

Again this was my best variety, with a few specimens getting pretty large. Nice bright red skin. I'll keep growing this one unless/until I find a better orange variety.

Molokai Purple

This variety also did well again. Love the color! Now I have enough to actually do a taste comparison between purple and orange sweet potatoes. In 2010 I learned that White Yam was much drier and firmer than orange sweet potatoes. It made excellent sweet potato fries, while orange sweet potatoes can sometimes fall apart when they cook (fine if you're mashing them, but bad for fries). I'm interested to see what purple sweet potatoes are like in flavor and texture.

Carolina Nugget

Again Carolina Nugget was OK but not great. I got a few nice-looking potatoes, but not many. I gave it a second chance, but now I've decided to discontinue it. It's too similar to Garnet, but inferior, so out it goes.

For new varieties to try, I ordered three from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange: Sweetie Pie, O'Henry, and Violetta. They came in bundles of six plants each, but sadly none of them did well.

Sweetie Pie

This is another ordinary orange variety, but unlike Garnet it has normal leaves instead of ivy leaves. I only got one root that wasn't split (the one at the top right of the picture), but it did get damaged by my digging fork. The rest were badly split all over.

This may not be completely their fault. This variety was right next to a big leak in the soaker hose, so when the sweet potatoes were watered, they got flooded. I didn't realize it would make that big of a difference, but maybe that's what split them.

Still, they went in the compost pile. I'll stick with Garnet for my orange variety for now.

O'Henry

This was my attempt to find another white variety, but as you can see, it turned out to be pretty pathetic.


Violetta

I don't even have a picture for Violetta. I think all the plants for this one died. I couldn't find any. It was supposed to be a variety with purple skin and white flesh. I was curious to find out what a potato like that would taste like (more like a purple or like a white?), but I guess I'll have a try another one next year.


Conclusions

I'm keeping Molokai Purple and Garnet again for next year, but that's it. They didn't give quite the bumper crop I wanted, but still did respectably, especially compared to all the other varieties I tried this year.

The plants I got from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange weren't quite as good as Duck Creek Farms. DCF's slips were in excellent condition when they arrived, while SESE's slips were in more typical condition for slips that just spent some time packed up in a box. I'm not sure if DCF does something special to help their plants make the journey, or if I was just lucky that time. I'm also not sure if it matters all that much, since the slips I grew in 2010 were from Shumway's, and they looked more like SESE's slips, but ended up growing just fine.

Another problem was DEER! The deer feasted on the sweet potato leaves several times before I discovered I Must Garden Deer Repellent. Even though the plants grew back, I'm sure having to regrow all those leaves diverted a lot of resources away from growing lots of roots.

Finally, Bermudagrass is starting to invade my raised beds. It was especially bad on the side where I planted the new varieties from SESE. I hate that stuff! It's coming in from the surrounding lawn. A project on my to-do list is to put landscape fabric and mulch around all the raised beds so that there isn't grass right next to them.

I'm already wondering which new sweet potato varieties I should try next year. Should I get some other varieties from Duck Creek Farms, since they did so well? Should I try a different place, like Sand Hill Preservation Center? Should I go back to Shumway's and get more White Yam since they did so well in 2010?

In the meantime, I think this year I'll make sweet potato pie for Thanksgiving.

Garlic Harvest 2014

The garlic has been harvested, cured, cleaned, and is ready to review. This was the best garlic harvest since 2010. All this garlic except the Elephant garlic was bought from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. The Elephant garlic is descended from the original Elephant garlic I got back in 2009 from Seed Savers Exchange. All the garlic was planted on October 5, 2013 in a raised bed in the front garden and mulched with grass clippings.

Elephant Garlic
Harvested: 5/22/2014

I harvested my elephant garlic too late. It's tricky to tell when to harvest garlic. Too early, and the bulbs haven't divided into cloves yet. Too late, and the cloves fall apart once the bulbs dry out. As you can see from this picture, a lot of my elephant garlic fell apart. It's not a huge deal, but they don't last as long this way.

I don't think elephant garlic is as mild as some people make it out to be, but it's true that it doesn't give me the garlic breath that true garlic does.

Lorz Italian
Harvested: 5/22/2014

This was the best variety of garlic I grew this year. It had the biggest bulbs of any of the true garlics I grew (that is, aside from the elephant garlic). Lorz Italian is an artichoke type of softneck garlic, and those seem to be the best garlics for my region (though I haven't given Asiatcs, Turbans, or Creoles a good try yet, since they're a lot harder to find). I haven't tasted this garlic yet, but the various catalogs describe it as strongly flavored. I'm just impressed by how vigorous the plants were and the nice hefty bulbs I ended up harvesting. Definitely growing again!

Red Toch
Harvested: 5/12/2014

This is another artichoke variety. I first planted this variety in 2010 (though it was listed under the name Tochliavri), and it did OK but not great. I gave it another chance this year, and again, OK but not great. The bulbs are usable, but much smaller on average (maybe around half the size) of Lorz Italian. Gourmet Garlic Gardens describes it as having a mild flavor, but I haven't done any side-by-side taste comparisons of my garlics (at least not yet). Will grow again, but if it doesn't start to adapt and improve with some bigger bulbs next year, I may discontinue it and concentrate on some other artichoke varieties.

S&H Silverskin

Harvested: 5/11/2014

This is the first silverskin I've ever grown. Silverskins are another sub-type of softneck garlic, but they're supposed to store much longer than artichokes. They're also supposed to be the last to mature, but I harvested these first, and they were ready. The bulbs turned out to be small like Red Toch. I'll have to see if it really does end up storing longer than the other varieties. Growing different varieties of garlic is a good idea so you can have different harvest and storage times. I wanted to add silverskins to my repertoire specifically for their storage abilities. I'll grow S&H again, but will try some more silverskin varieties in the future to see if any do better than this one.


In summary, Elephant garlic needs to be harvested in early May, and Lorz Italian is a keeper. Red Toch might not be worth it. S&H Silverskin might be worth growing, but other silverskins might be better.

I will grow all these varieties again next time, but have ordered Nootka Rose (a silverskin) and Inchelium Red (an artichoke) from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange for this fall. Not sure yet if I want to order more new varieties besides those.

All in all, this was a good harvest. Even though a lot of the bulbs were small, they're still usable, and I shouldn't have to buy any garlic at the grocery store again for a long time.

Potato Harvest 2014

I dug up the potatoes on Monday before we got the rainstorm. It was a little disappointing, but that was my fault. I planted a lot of my potatoes in November, thinking I could get an extra early harvest. Instead, most of them froze to death. I planted a second batch of potatoes in January, and those were the ones I harvested this week. So once again I didn't get that many potatoes, and will have to save most or all of them for planting next year.

Now I know that potatoes should not be planted in Texas before January!

I ended up getting 2.8 pounds of Red Pontiac and 2.0 pounds of Purple Viking. I'll save these to replant next year, and maybe buy another variety or two to try.

Fava Bean Pasta

Here's one of the things I did with some of the harvest of nice green spring vegetables I got in April and May.

I didn't grow any hardneck garlics this time, but I did grow Elephant garlic, which makes some nice fat scapes.

Here is the Swiss chard before it started bolting. I like this "perpetual spinach" type variety with it's small, tender leaves.

But the star of this dish was the fava beans. I've never even eaten fava beans before, but they turned out to be really easy to grow over the winter, and they're really tasty. They are a little bit of a pain to prepare in the kitchen, though. First you have to get them out of their pods, then blanch them in boiling water for 2 minutes.

Next you need to peel them. The seed coats of fava beans are really tough and inedible, so you have to take each bean individually and pop them out of their skins. At least the beans are pretty big, about the size of a large lima bean, so you don't have to peel too many to get enough for a meal. In the picture you can see the peels on the left and the peeled beans on the right.

Then I sliced up the elephant garlic scapes into small pieces.

Sautéed the scapes in a pan with some prosciutto and olive oil. I wanted to use pancetta, but couldn't find any, so I used prosciutto instead, torn up into little pieces.

Meanwhile, I cooked some pasta.

The cooked pasta, peeled fava beans, and chard were added to the pan once the prosciutto was starting to get a little crispy. That was stirred around until the chard wilted.

To finish off the dish, I added some cracked black pepper, a little of the reserved pasta cooking water, some shredded parmesan cheese, and some heavy cream to make a nice sauce. A splash of white wine would have been nice too, but I was out. It was still really good without it.

So this dish used three ingredients from my garden. It can be tweaked too. Some fresh green peas would be good instead of or in addition to the fava beans. I would think any kind of green could work in place of the chard. Garlic cloves could be used instead of garlic scapes, but garlic scapes have such a nice mild flavor.

Next year I'm growing a lot more fava beans!

Sweet Potato Harvest 2013

In 2010 I had a nice sweet potato harvest, but then in 2011 the drought killed them all, and in 2012 I was busy moving.

Now I have just harvested Sweet Potato Class of 2013! It's not nearly as good as 2010, but hey at least I got sweet potatoes.

I got the slips from Duck Creek Farms this time, and they arrived in excellent condition. I don't think I've ever had mail-order plants look this good before. I only ordered 5 plants of each variety just to test them out.

To be fair to the sweet potatoes, I didn't plant them in the best spot. They were in the back garden, on the very back row, near the trees which probably shaded them a bit. They were also neglected a bit back there. I didn't get much of a harvest, but frankly I'm glad I got anything at all this time.

I probably won't eat many of these if I eat any at all. I'm going to save most of them for growing slips to replant next year. Next time I'm planting them in my new raised beds with lots of nice soil that won't be so hard on either me (to dig them up!) or the sweet potatoes.

Carolina Nugget

This variety had a bushy growth habit, rather than long vines. It has what I think are called "ivy leaves" in sweet potato terminology. The leaves had deep lobes and were very pretty. I didn't get very many roots from them, but the ones I did get were nice looking. The skin ranges from orange to red, and the interior is "normal" orange sweet potato color.

Garnet

This variety is also listed as Dianne by Duck Creek Farms, but I think Garnet is a more descriptive name, because most of the roots had a nice red color. The inside is also orange. It was basically like a more vigorous version of Carolina Nugget. The leaves were not as deeply lobed, and the vines were much longer. This was actually the most vigorous plant above ground, with lots of vines trailing all over the place, and it ended up flowering with pretty purple morning glory flowers (sweet potatoes being a species of morning glory, after all). When I dug them up, I angered several honeybees that were working on the flowers, but didn't get stung. Too bad they didn't have time to make seeds, since growing true sweet potato seeds would be an interesting project.

Below ground matched above ground. This variety gave me the biggest yield of the biggest roots.

Molokai Purple

This is a variety from Hawaii, and was the second most vigorous variety, with the second biggest yield. The vines had "normal" leaves, which means they weren't deeply lobed like the orange varieties I grew. They were also very pretty, with a purple tint to the newer leaves.

This variety got the most damage from the frost we had a few days ago, which is what prompted me to go ahead and harvest them before the next frost hits.

The coolest thing about this variety is it's purple through and through. I accidentally broke one potato, and the color inside doesn't look real.

White Triumph

This variety was not particularly triumphant. I got it because some sources say that this is the same variety as White Yam and Southern Queen. White Yam was one of my best varieties from 2010, so I was eager to grow it again.

Now I'm pretty sure this is not the same thing. The vines were always yellow and sickly looking, and by August most of them had died. When I dug up what was left of them today, what you see in the picture is literally all I got.

Next year I'd like to get the "real" White Yam again, which R.H. Shumway still carries. Or maybe I'll get Southern Queen which is carried by Sand Hill Preservation Center, because I've heard good things about that variety too. White Triumph went in the compost pile.


To sum things up, in order from best to worst this year were: Garnet, Molokai Purple, Carolina Nugget, and White Triumph.

I'm not growing White Triumph again and will need to seek out a better white variety. I think the other three all deserve a second chance. I will probably eliminate one of the orange ones eventually, since they seem kind of redundant, but I don't have the heart to eliminate Carolina Nugget just yet.

2013 Tomato Reviews (and Paste Tomato Trial Results)

This year's tomato reviews are going to be a bit less detailed than usual, mainly because those darn deer and chickens caused so much damage to the tomatoes that I don't feel I can judge them adequately. Still, I feel that I managed to gather at least a little data that may be useful.

I attempted to do a paste tomato trial with these five varieties:

• Amish Paste - obtained from an online seed swap in 2012
• Big Month - seed saved myself in 2012, originally from Baker Creek
• Hawkins Plum - seed saved myself in 2010, originally from an online seed swap
• Opalka - obtained from the same swap as Amish Paste
• Rio Grande - seed saved myself in 2011, originally from an online seed swap

I planted four plants of each variety in the front garden, which was my big mistake. What the deer didn't eat the chickens pecked. All I can do is give you my general impressions.

Amish Paste

This turned out to be the only indeterminate variety of the bunch. The plants grew much larger and more vigorously than the rest, and were ready to harvest the earliest.

The thing is, the tomatoes I got didn't match the descriptions from most of the catalogs. I got this variety from a GardenWeb seed swap, and I wonder if there was a mix-up or the seeds were crossed. All the catalogs say that Amish Paste is supposed to be large for a paste tomato, and this turned out to be my smallest variety, about the size of a small chicken egg. I also had one plant that produced these weird deeply ribbed fruits, that I wish I remembered to get a picture of.

The only thing that did match the descriptions was how this was the juiciest paste tomato. A lot of the catalogs say this isn't really much of a paste tomato, since it has more of the consistency of a tomato for fresh eating.

Still, I have a strong suspicion I got some atypical seeds. I'm reserving judgment on this variety until I get some from a more reputable source for comparison. It's possible Amish Paste just makes smaller tomatoes in my climate, but I want to make sure.

Opalka

I got these from the same source as Amish Paste, but they seemed to match the catalog descriptions. They were the latest of all the varieties, but they did make large, pepper-shaped fruits. This variety made the largest fruits of the bunch, some of them the same size and shape as a Poblano pepper. As you can see from the picture, they were much less juicy than Amish Paste.

I was pretty happy with this variety and think it deserves another chance. I liked having great big fruits, which are much easier to harvest than lots of little fruits. The plants seemed vigorous and healthy. Some of them had green shoulders and some cracking on top, but that's not a big deal. Little to no blossom end rot.


The other three tomatoes were ones I grew before, and I didn't get pictures of them this time.

Hawkins Plum was disappointing again. Last time I grew it, it had a lot of blossom end rot and didn't yield well, but I had nothing to compare it to. Now that I had it next to other paste tomatoes, I'm sure this one isn't good for me. The foliage was noticeably wispier than the other varieties too, which was something I hadn't noticed before I did a side-by-side comparison. It's disappointing since I got it from someone on GardenWeb who said it was a beloved old family heirloom. Oh well, he can keep it. I'm going to discontinue this variety.

Big Month and Rio Grande were very similar and hard to tell apart. Both had short, stocky plants that yielded large, blocky fruits. Both seemed to have yielded well, with little to no blossom end rot or other cosmetic defects. The plants seemed healthy. One of the Rio Grande plants got completely dug up by the chickens and died, so I only had three plants of that one, making it hard to do a fair comparison.

Both of these deserve another chance in another trial where I can better compare the two varieties.


To summarize Paste Tomato Trial 2013: Big Month, Rio Grande, and Opalka are all worth growing again. Hawkins Plum and Amish Paste probably won't be grown again. Some day maybe I'll get Amish Paste from another source and give it another chance, but from what I've read even the "real" variety isn't much of a paste variety, and there are so many other varieties of tomatoes out there to try I might never get around to it.


I also grew a couple of other varieties of non-paste tomatoes just to I'd have them to eat.

Dr. Carolyn

The only other yellow tomato I'd grown before was Yellow Pear, and it wasn't any good. I wasn't surprised, because everything I've read about that tomato agrees that it isn't good and is only grown for the cute shape. I wanted to try a yellow cherry tomato that did get good reviews, so this was the one I chose. The first batch of tomatoes I harvested were bland just like Yellow Pear, which made me start thinking maybe yellow tomatoes are all this way.

They got considerably better later in the year as things heated up. Hot, dry weather seems to concentrate the flavors of all sorts of garden fruits, and this tomato got considerably sweeter, though it never has developed the deep flavor of something like Black Cherry. Tomato color seems to be correlated with flavor, with the darkest tomatoes having the most intense flavors. It's probably unfair to expect a light yellow tomato to be anything more than sweet.

Still, this tomato has some other things going for it. I only planted two plants, and I'm still getting more tomatoes than I can keep up with. It's still yielding here in mid-August after all the other tomatoes have quit, though cherry tomatoes are usually more heat-tolerant than other types. It is fun to have a variety of colors of cherry tomatoes. I can see this working well mixed with some Black Cherry and a red variety in a salad or pasta dish.

I'm keeping this one.

I also planted some Red Brandywine to use for sandwiches. I grew this once before, and again it did great just like last time, so nothing new to report. Because of deer damage I didn't get the yields I expected, but I still got plenty for sandwiches until the heat got it.


Now I know not to plant tomatoes (or peppers, squash, or beans) in the front garden without some kind of protection. I still got a lot of tomatoes, especially once we put chicken wire around them to keep the critters out. I stuck most of them in freezer bags, and plan to make a big batch of pasta sauce with them once the weather cools down so I feel like slaving over a hot stove again. I just would have gotten a lot more without the deer and chickens.

Roasted Tomatillo Sauce

I ended up getting about 3 lbs. of tomatillos from my 3 surviving plants. That's actually not much. Tomatillos are supposed to be very prolific. I blame the deer and chickens for damaging the plants so they didn't yield as well.

Tomatillos keep well in their husks in the vegetable drawer in the fridge. I was able to stash them in there until I had enough saved up for a batch of roasted tomatillo sauce. I got the recipe off the internet, but soon found out this isn't really something that needs a recipe. Everything can be done to taste.

Peel the husks off like 2 or 3 lbs. of tomatillos and rinse them. Lay them out on a baking sheet with some serranos and/or jalapenos (cut the stems off) and peel whole garlic cloves. As you can see, the peppers I used had already turned red, which was not intentional, but I didn't get to them while they were still green.

Put under the broiler until the veggies are getting brown in spots and soften. The tomatillos will sort of get squishy and collapse and the juice will run out. Yum.

Let it cool, and then scrape everything in the blender, making sure to get all the juice in. Add cilantro, salt, and lime juice to taste. Blend until smooth.

I put mine in plastic containers and froze it. You can also water-bath can this, but in that case you'd need to be much more careful with the ratios and use an exact recipe. It's especially important to put enough lime juice in to make it acidic enough to be safe.

I didn't put much lime juice in so I can slather it over enchiladas, but more lime would probably be better if you wanted it as a dip. When I tasted it, it also turned out hotter than I intended. I made the mistake of not de-seeding the peppers, and peppers you grow yourself tend to get hotter when the weather is hotter and the plants are under stress. But otherwise it was really tasty.

Speaking of chickens, one day the neighbor's chickens jumped the back fence (they usually stay in the front), and dug through my herb garden. Then two of them forgot how to get back out and just kept pacing back and forth by the fence like they wanted to go home but forgot they can jump over. Stupid chickens! We had to open the gate and herd them out.

Potato Harvest 2013

I just harvested my potatoes, but I really should have done it about a month ago. Just been too busy, and thought they would be fine waiting in the ground.

Lesson learned. Next time I'm harvesting them as soon as the tops are mostly dead. For one thing, it was hot, sweaty work digging them up when it was over 100 degrees. For another thing, they didn't look so good when I did get them out.



Some of the potatoes had already started to sprout, as you see in this picture on the left. On the right is a good example of the many potatoes I dug up that had holes in them from bugs tunneling into them. Yuck! Some of them had also rotted. I threw those away, but kept the sprouted ones, and the ones that has some holes in them, if the rest of the potato seemed OK.

Last time I grew potatoes, I hardly got out more than I put in. Central Texas isn't a very good potato growing area, but I've read that you can expect about a 5-fold yield here. However, that's much less than in good potato growing areas where you can get a 10-fold yield.

This year I planted 3 pounds of two varieties, Purple Viking and Red Pontiac, and got about twice that much back. That's an improvement, so I hope that as I get my soil better and better I might finally get up to that 5-fold yield.

Just like last time, the Purple Viking potatoes were the best variety. I got 6.16 pounds of them, and they also generally looked like they were in better shape, with fewer bug holes and sprouts.

The Red Pontiac potatoes yielded 5.63 and had a lot more damage from bugs. This is a variety from Florida that's supposed to do well in the South, but I really should have dug them earlier.

A while ago I got a few yellow potatoes in my CSA bag, and they sprouted before I had a chance to eat them. I went ahead and planted them in containers just to see what I'd get. It was a bit late for potato planting at that time, but I did end up getting about half a pound of small potatoes that will make good seed potatoes next time. I'm not sure what variety they are, but they're probably Yukon Gold. They look like Yukon Golds, and it's a popular variety.

Finally, you may be wondering whatever happened to the mini-potatoes I grew from true potato seed. Well, sadly, most of them rotted. I dug the ones up that didn't rot and put them in the fridge for safe keeping. I really should have put them in the fridge right away to begin with. This is all I have left.

I've decided I'm going to stick all these potatoes in the fridge and use them as seed potatoes to plant this winter for next year's harvest. Potatoes you want to eat shouldn't be kept in the fridge because it makes them convert their starches to sugars and taste bad, but for planting that doesn't matter. The Purple Viking and especially Red Pontiac potatoes look so bad from being left in the ground too long that I really don't feel like eating any of them anyway. Since they're already starting to sprout, I think they'll make fine seed potatoes. Putting them in the fridge should make them go dormant, and then when it's time to plant them this winter, they should sprout this fine. Maybe next time the soil will be improved enough for me to get an even better harvest, and next time I'll dig them much sooner before they start to rot or get eaten by bugs in the ground.

Eggplant Harvest

I just harvested a bunch of Fengyuan Purple eggplants. I've never seen an eggplant this long and skinny before.

The lighting for the picture wasn't that great, but you get the idea. I stuck my hand in there for scale. The longest ones are over a foot long.

The deer haven't really been bothering the plants, but several of the eggplants have marks like these in them. Looks like marks from chicken beaks to me! The neighbor's chickens strike again. So much for that idea that chickens are good for the garden. They're almost as destructive as deer! I think most of the eggplants are salvageable. I can cut the pecked part off and eat the rest, but I also found some more tomatoes that had been pecked and earwigs were eating the rest.

I'm looking forward to making some delicious curries and stir-fries with these!

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.