Harvest Report - Carrots, Kale, Potatoes

Carrots

We're getting lots of carrots now, full of flavor, not like the grocery store variety that mostly taste like cardboard. (The breakfast radishes are also doing well, adding spice to our salads. They're a tad "hotter" than the standard radishes.)

Here are some interesting carrot observations:

1. You can't tell how big it will be by the size of its topper.

2. A few of our carrots seem to have run into something in the dirt. Since there are no rocks, it must be bits of bark or other stuff in the compost mix. Stunted as they are, these carrots are still tasty.

3. Something's amiss. We wondered about underground insects, but on looking up carrot problems, we found that it's most likely due to over or under watering. Since only a couple of our carrots have this problem, we're not going to change anything. And, after cutting away the affected parts, even these carrots were tasty.

Kale

The kale is such an unexpected pleasure. Neither of us had eaten kale previously. Now Robin stir-fries it, puts it in soups, and makes a fantastic massaged kale salad with apples and Gorgonzola cheese. She also likes how it looks in the garden, like dark, intensely green fountains spraying over the edge of the horse troughs.

Potatoes

We harvested the second gunny sack of potatoes. Disappointment! We expected potatoes at all levels in the 50 or so inches of dirt. That didn't happen. Robin dug and dug... and dug...a ton o' dirt... all the way to the first 6" of dirt, the initial planting level. There she found potatoes, a modest single-level harvest of reasonably-sized spuds. Next year, we'll forget the gunny sacks, plant near the top of 8 or so inches of dirt, and cover with leaves or straw as the plants grow.. So much for gunny sacks!

Harvesting Spuds + First Ripe Tomato!

Today was a big harvest day, above average zucchini yield (about 3 pounds), plus we decided to dig into the first gunny sack we planted with potatoes and see what we got.

Here's how it looked on day 1, potato planting day, which was around the 1st of May.

After 2 weeks, we had some leaves showing.

After a couple more weeks, we were ready to start unrolling the sack so we could add more dirt.

We did two batches of gunny sack potatoes. For the first we used an old sack I'd been storing in the garage for a long time. In that one, we planted fingerling potatoes and a few Yukon golds. For the second batch, we used a brand new gunny sack and planted bakers. About the second time we unfolded the old sack to add more dirt, it began to fall apart, rotting. Therefore, we were never able to fill it as per the plan.

Today, Robin decided to see and harvest whatever was produced in the three layers of dirt. The other sack is still going strong, filled to the brim and not yet dying off.

Here's what we got.  And see that one little cherry tomato?  It's our first ripe tomato!!! Sweet as can be! We ate some of the fingerlings for dinner tonight. Delicious!!!

Here's what we learned. Don't use old gunny sacks for growing potatoes. We stopped watering when the tops started to bloom. We think it would be better to keep watering them until the tops turn yellow and collapse. There were more than 50 potatoes about the size of a pea or slightly larger, willing and able to grow into something big enough to eat. It's all an experiment for us. One thing to try next year is to plant the spuds with a little more dirt beneath them. Maybe not watering, but waiting longer to harvest would be a good thing too. We'll do it a little differently with the other sack and see how that goes.

Here's our one ripe tomato.  More on the way soon. Lots more!

And here is the still unharvested gunny sack; only now it's totally unrolled, filled with dirt all the way to the top. What does it hold? How many spuds will we get? Keep tuned for the answer to that one...

Vegetables Growing Well!

Here is an updated picture of the garden taken a few days ago.

Since our original posts in early May, we have added and planted two more troughs, for a total of four. In the troughs we are growing:

• red leaf lettuce
• green and red romaine lettuce
• French crisp lettuce
• oakleaf red saladbowl lettuce
• spinach
• early beets
• radishes
• carrots (Nantes Half Long)
• cherry tomatoes
• roma tomatoes
• summer squash (yellow)
• summer squash (green)
• zucchini (black beauty)
• acorn squash
• red beauty sweet peppers
• a few marigolds for insect control and salad decorations

 

We're already eating delicious salads from our garden including various lettuces, beet greens, spinach and radish greens.

In addition to the troughs, we are growing three types of potatoes using the gunny-sack method...

and strawberries planted in a half-oak-barrel.

This will be the full extent of our garden for 2011, although we'll rotate in a few new crops in the late summer or early fall. Depending on how it goes this year, we may add two or four more troughs next year. We will definitely want to add peas and beans.

Potatoes

I'm Irish, well part Irish, so of course we have to grow potatoes. We chose some organic red fingerlings and a white potato to start. The knowledgeable helper at the nursery told us about the gunny-sack growing method and we decided to try it.

We planted the spuds in the bottom of a gunny-sack with the top rolled most of the way down in dirt that does not include manure (we eat the skins). As they develop a some height (about 6 inches), we'll roll up the sack a little and add soil. We will continue to roll the bag up and add soil periodically until the plants flower. At that time we will cease to water them and wait to harvest until the tops begin to die back.

This leaky, old, galvanized bucket is a perfect holder for the gunny sack. I drilled a bunch of extra holes in the bottom for good drainage.