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 and Planting

Never saw such a huge tomato plant! It's a cherry tomato and supposed to be small... must be 5' x 5'! Has lots of blossoms. If the weather stays warm, we're going to be begging neighbors to take them, along with the zucchinis.

For a long time we had no sets. At the suggestion of our gardener-friend-neighbor, we bought some blossom set. Seems to have done the job. Or maybe it's just that we finally had some sunny days. Now there are lots of these little green balls. Green tomato omelets with Jarlsberg cheese are pretty tasty, but we hope at least some of them ripen.

Note about watering: All the troughs are now taking at least some water in the 4" bottom reservoir each day. The tomato-zucchini trough takes a LOT.  A couple of weeks ago, we stopped top watering in that trough completely. The plants are thriving, so we assume their roots are well tapped into the reservoir. We still do light top-watering in the other three troughs, especially because of the winter-crop seedlings. 

Robin planted the first of our winter-crop seeds on July 25th. By row number from front to back, these seedlings are:

1. Left: spinach, Center: butterhead lettuce, Right, Romaine lettuce
2. Toscana kale
3. flat of Egypt beets

On July 29th, she planted more winter crop seeds... top left: beets; center left: kale, center: broccoli, right: carrots. We made a special trip to South Beach to get white pebbles to mark the trough.

These are the breakfast radishes. Like the beets, they push above the surface of the dirt rather than grow down. We don't know if that's normal or not. Doesn't seem to hurt them. They're slightly more "peppery" than the cherry radishes. The second crop, planted about 2 weeks after these is coming along nicely.

We harvested our first carrot today! It's not so big. Guess we'll wait a while longer to harvest any more of them.

The squash is going crazy! Robin harvested our first acorn squash (two more almost ready), our third eight ball squash and we stopped counting the zucchinis. For dinner tonight, we had fresh sliced zucchini, radishes and the one carrot to dip in blue cheese dressing with our pizza.

Gunny Sack Potatoes

If you've been reading my posts, you know we decided to grow our potatoes in gunny sacks this year. I wrote about it here.

The first sack we planted now looks like this:

We figure it's time to unroll the sack a bit and add more dirt. Since some of the sprouts are more developed than others, we'll have to bury a few leaves. We didn't anticipate growth differentiation and hope it's not a problem.

Powdery Mildew... Treatment Plan

With the moist, cool and somewhat humid spring (typical of the Northwest), our squash, peppers and tomatoes (all heat and sunshine lovers) developed powdery mildew. Yuk!

We let it go a little too long and some of the leaves were covered with it. Research time! First we asked our neighbor at Bountiful Herbs Garden, who said we might be able to prevent further developments of it by spraying with baking soda mixed with water and a little liquid soap. We then searched on line, where we found many useful articles, particularly this one by a California Master Gardner. We decided not to risk contamination of our soil with baking soda and to try, instead, a commercial sulfur treatment.

But first, Robin pruned away all the seriously infected leaves, leaving only those with slight-blight. Powdery mildew spreads by contact such as by touching infected leaves with your fingers and then touching non-infected leaves or by wind, and can also spread by getting into the dirt. Therefore, we disposed of the pruned leaved in a sealed plastic bag in our garbage (not good for the compost!).

We then sprayed the new growth and remaining slight-blight growth using this fungicide which is recommended by our local Master Gardner group as good for organic gardening. I think we've saved our plants! This is how they look now, after pruning and spraying.

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.

Planting Our Garden

At last, with water, fence and horse-trough preparations behind us, we are ready to start planting.

We bought organic starts from Browne's Nursery, located here on San Juan Island:

    ~ lettuces (romaine, red romaine and red leaf)
    ~ early beets
    ~ spinach

Here is Robin planting the romaine lettuces.

 

Here's how the garden looks with our first two troughs partially planted. We will plant some more after it warms up a bit more. We're still in the mid-30s at night.