Sweet Potatoes at PAR

We cleared out the last of the crops from the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden today. There were still winter squash and sweet potatoes. Pulling up the squash vines was a big job, but we found more than 40 pounds of good squash in the vines, and we have been getting 20 or so pounds of squash each week for a while now. That was a successful crop!

The big job of the day, though, was digging up the sweet potatoes. (Alert: lots of photos ahead.)

Even though we already had done a lot of work cleaning up the squash vines, we were pretty excited about the sweet potatoes. Here we are, just getting started:



How clean we all still were! We found potatoes of all shapes and sizes, and every single one was a joy to find.



There were quite a few "lunkers" under those vines.



And this plant came up like a string of sausages, which made us all chuckle.



Part of the fun is that digging sweet potatoes requires partners. The person digging benefits from having a "spotter" to help make sure that no sweet goes unharvested.



We did all slow down a bit, after a while. The digging was hard work! It was great that so many gardeners showed up to help.



After watching several of us make trips to the compost pile with armloads of vines, Gloria very wisely went to get a wheelbarrow from the shed. At first, moving the vines to the (Very Large) compost pile hadn't seemed like all that big of a job, but the vines were heavy. The wheelbarrow helped.



We completed the first pass through the area where the sweet potatoes had been planted, pulling vines and digging, and then we re-dug the entire bed to locate strays. We found some, but not too many. It was a good idea to have done the extra work though. Look how many sweets we found after we were finally done!:



After the digging, we sat down to sort. The good sweets were destined for the Center for Family Resources in Marietta, but we always have a pretty big pile of damaged sweets. The garden has a wireworm problem that we have been treating with beneficial (predatory!) nematodes for a couple of years now, and that has been making a difference. We saw the least wireworm damage this year of any year so far.

In addition to the wireworm damage, there are always some sweets that are accidentally skewered by spading forks, and there is always some damage from small mammals. In the end, though, we had more than 260 pounds of good sweets to take to Marietta. They filled the back of our fearless leader's car.



The squash had to go in the back seat, along with her garden tools. It is amazing that any gardener's car is ever clean, but this car was spotless before the spading forks went in.



Besides the squash and sweet potatoes, the garden still had flowers in it, and those had to be cleared out, too. Cathy took a minute to make bouquets from the zinnias and the sprays of purple seeds from the Jewels of Opar, so most of us had flowers to bring home.



The next-to-last job for the morning was to spread kelp meal and some more sulfur (the pH is still a little high...) over the entire garden. The very last job was to finish marking the sprinkler heads for the new irrigation system. A couple of gardeners had been busy locating those and driving stakes next to them so they would be easy to spot, but there there were a few left to mark.

Tomorrow, the garden will be tilled, and next week, we will broadcast seeds for our cover crop. Then, sometime in the next few weeks, we will celebrate!

Veggies, Continued

The harvests aren't spectacular, but they have been steady. Today, we are scheduled for rain, which will help keep the veggies coming for a while longer. We don't get eggplant every day, so the picture includes a little more variety than usual for September in my yard.

The okra will probably get fried for supper either tonight or tomorrow; the tomatoes go into salads and sandwiches quickly enough that I will go hunting in the yard for more either tomorrow or Monday; some of the peppers we'll use in supper tonight, but the rest are headed for the freezer; and the white eggplant will be eaten in the next day or two.

The cowpeas have been both late and slow, which I am sure is my own fault. I have about a cup and a half of dried cowpeas so far. The peas in the picture will be added to the jar after they are shelled out and truly dry. I am hoping that the first freeze holds off long enough for the plants to produce a full quart, but that seems pretty unlikely.

I planted the cowpeas in the popcorn-patch in early July, after the corn was already very far along. Between the shade and the competition for water, the poor cowpeas had quite a struggle to get going. Last year, I had planted the cowpeas where and when the summer squash came out. That worked better. Live and learn.

Sweet Exuberance

This is what I see every day when I go out the front door:



The sweet potatoes are actually planted in what is about a 6x3 foot arc of garden to the right of the bird bath. As usual with happy plants, they've spilled out all over.

I have another week or two to enjoy the craziness, but I plan to harvest them a little earlier than usual this year. I tend to wait until the middle of October, but we've hardly had rain the last several weeks, and the watering has been taking some time. I would like to be able to limit my watering efforts to the fall crops, which would make my evenings after work a little easier.

Between Seasons

The summer crops are definitely slowing down, but it doesn't help that I've pulled up a lot of plants to make room for fall veggies. What's interesting is that there are so many green tomatoes out on the plants that are left, and yet my tomato harvest for today isn't especially spectacular.



One plant that HAS been spectacular is the Yellow Marble cherry tomato. One evening last week, the major ingredient for our pasta sauce was little yellow tomatoes, and we have been running a tray of these through the dehydrator every week or two.

We expect to sprinkle the little dried tomato chips onto salads and sandwiches throughout the winter.

On the tray, before they go into the dehydrator, the tomatoes look like egg yolks.



The one plant that is producing all of these yellow cherry tomatoes is still going strong, but I am going to pull the plant up soon regardless, to make way for some more kale.



Another tomato variety that has gone "above and beyond" in terms of production is the Wuhib paste tomato. I have two of these in the ground, and both are still covered with green tomatoes even though these plants have been producing steadily all summer long.



Cherokee purple, the variety that did so well for me last year, was kind of a bust this year. We got some tomatoes from these, but not the abundance that we had last year. However, Rutgers has been producing steadily all summer long, so the relative lack of Cherokee purple tomatoes hasn't been a disaster.

I did start additional tomato plants to set out at the end of June, when the onions and garlic came out. These plants (two Rutgers, two costolluto genovese, two yellow-out-red-in) are now just about bursting with green tomatoes. The yellow-out-red-in tomatoes are small, but a couple have ripened already so I can say with assurance that they are good to eat.



As expected, all the peppers have been very happy with the extraordinarily hot summer; they are all doing just fine. We eat a lot of peppers, though. These (Ancho peppers) will probably be filled with that Mexican crumbling cheese, that doesn't liquify and run out of the pepper when it gets hot, and cooked out on the grill.



The "real" spinach (Malabar spinach to me, "real" spinach to the mail carrier from Barbados)is taking over its bed and the one next to it. The vines have stretched across the aisle in between the beds and are now climbing through the okra. I obviously have a lot of eating to do.



My fall crops are all still pretty small. The beets are just strappy cotyledons poking out of the ground, but the Bok Choy, spinach, lettuce, carrots, radishes, etc. have all past that stage; most of those plants have at least a couple of true leaves now. Seeing them out in the garden makes me happy.

Mexican Bean Beetles

Every year brings its own trials. This year, the Mexican bean beetles have been ferocious. At the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden, we tried spraying with Neem, but that didn't seem to bother the beetles at all. At home, I've just been smashing them, one beetle (or larva) at a time, but the beetles are winning. This is what most of the leaves on my pole beans look like:



And this is the adult form of the critter that is turning the bean leaves into lace:



The adult beetle looks enough like a ladybug (it is even in the ladybug family!) that most people would think it's a good guy. They would be wrong.

When the beetles are mature, they lay eggs, clusters of yellow dots. At some point, these eggs will hatch.



When the eggs hatch, what comes out doesn't look at all like a beetle. It is a fuzzy yellow larva. The larval stage of this beetle is heck on the leaves of bean plants. When I was looking for larvae to photograph, I couldn't find any young ones. These (below) have gone, I think, into the pupa stage.



When the pupa completes its development, it breaks out of its husk (like cicadas do) in the more familiar beetle form. There is an empty husk on the upper leaf in the picture below.



The big question is what to do about all these beetles. I am thinking about pulling up all the pole bean plants, but I still have cowpeas growing in another part of the garden. I am concerned that, without the pole beans around, those cowpeas will look a lot more tasty; right now, the cowpeas are bean-beetle free.

I have read that adult beetles overwinter in leaf litter, so I am definitely going to be turning the garden's soil some this winter, to make sure that remaining adults are exposed to whatever cold we have this year--- but last year we had a very cold winter; I am not sure how so many beetles survived!

Still Food in the Yard, but Less

These veggies are in my smaller dough bowl; if they were in the big one, they would look a little lost, but there is still enough here to really enjoy. We will be eating the okra tonight with supper, along with the tomatoes and some of the peppers.

I had thought that there were no cucumbers left in the yard, but I was mistaken. The little, slightly misshapen cucumber shown here, found in a tangle of vines I was working to untangle earlier today (most of the tangle was headed for the compost heap), will go into someone's lunchbox tomorrow as part of a Greek salad. We have some really great feta cheese from Harry's/Whole Foods!

A little more progress toward the fall garden was made today, too. More seeds are in the ground: lettuces, spinach, some beets. The turnips will have to wait for the weekend.

I was talking with a gardening friend this morning on the phone about fall planting, and he had a plan to drive up to Ladd's Farm Supply in Euharlee/Cartersville to get some plants. He is thinking that they will have collards, broccoli, etc. already.

If they do, that will be great! The usual plant outlets (Home Depot, Lowe's) don't get the fall veggies in stock this early, but the plants need to be in the ground this early. The odd timing is one of the great mysteries for our time.

Found Food: Cauliflower Mushroom

We found a really great fungus over the weekend, a cauliflower mushroom (Sparassis sp.). My copy of the book Mushrooms Demystified calls it both "edible and exceptional."

The mushroom, which doesn't look much like either a mushroom or a cauliflower, was growing at the base of a tree.



Up close, it was beautiful.



Of course, as members in good standing of the Mushroom Club of Georgia, we harvested the mushroom and brought it home to cook. My books all mention that

1. cleaning this particular fungus is not easy, and
2. cooking it so that it eventually becomes tender takes a while.


The books are right. I finally decided that a few little bark bits and dirt specks wouldn't hurt us, and that, even tough, this fungus was indeed exceptional. The texture was, as Joe pointed out, a little like "mushroom jerky," but the flavor was outstanding. I will definitely be looking for more of these!

Stinging Saddleback

Who would guess that something so small and squishy could pack such a wallop? My poor friend Cheryl sure didn't, and she ended up with a painful welt from a little guy a lot like this one:



The one she encountered was in her blueberry bush, and in my yard that's where I usually find them, too. She felt it before she saw it, which is also what happens with me. The one I found today, though, was on the popcorn.

I was cutting the old stalks and leaves up for the compost pile, and happily, I was wearing gloves, AND I saw it in time to avoid the stinging hairs.



The saddleback page from the bugguide website shows the adult moth stage of this caterpillar's lifecycle.

The University of Kentucky's stinging caterpillars page includes other caterpillars to watch out for.

Interestingly, both pages mention that the saddleback is sometimes found on corn. I hadn't seen it there before, but my own yard's corn definitely was home to a saddleback caterpillar this morning!

The University of Kentucky site mentions that the sting can cause "severe irritation," which seems like a huge understatement to me. The bugguide site's description of the sting seems a little closer to the truth, calling it "lasting and painful." Those two words are in line with my own experience.

My friend had never encountered one of these before, even though she is a Georgia-girl from birth. It took a dose of benadryl to reduce the size of the welt she got from the sting, so I hope she isn't ambushed by another one of these ever again!

The Garden of Mr. Hankerson and Mr. Kastner

Last night, the local Master Gardener group met at The Garden, as the sign above the entrance proclaims it, of Mr. Hankerson and Mr. Kastner. The word "garden" seemed like a massive understatement, though.

The first little building I saw driving in was a very cute chicken house.



The Garden is also home to some burros. These compete in shows, dressed up in "outfits," but the ones we saw were just out standing in their field.



Apparently, Mr. Hankerson and Mr. Kastner have been friends for many years. They used to talk about working a garden together, then one day Mr. Kastner's wife heard them talking about it and started laughing. She didn't take them seriously at all, so they got serious about it, and started. Now they have a huge garden, and they give the produce away---to fire stations, children's homes, senior homes, church pantries, etc.

The primary presentation for the evening was by Mr. Hankerson, who is County Manager for my county. He grew up on a farm in Tennessee, and he earned his undergraduate degree in Agronomy, so he had a lot to share with the rest of us gardeners.

One of the great things that he said was that "the soil test is the best fertilizer there is." This is so true. Knowledge about the soil's pH and fertility levels is what the gardener needs most in order to be successful.



The garden's soil looks like the same red clay that is in my yard, but it has been amended almost yearly with mixed stable-bedding and manure (horse). One year the soil test showed that the pH had gone up over 7, an effect of the horse manure, so they had to skip the manure for a couple of years, but the gardeners are sure that the bedding and manure has made a big improvement in the texture of the soil.

The Garden is large enough that tractors provide a lot of the "muscle" on the property, but not all of it. Most of the weeding is by hand (hoe or rake, actually), in spite of the size of the garden, so some areas had some weeds, but others were pretty much weed free.



Among the many crops in the garden is a big patch of straightneck squash. Some have been felled by the squash vine borers, but plenty of plants here are still alive. This (above) is the second planting of summer squash this season.

I took a picture of a tomato plant, in spite of the weeds, because I am so impressed by the sturdy staking of the cages. I've seen the cages of heavy wire (concrete reinforcing wire?) before--that's what Grandpa Bill uses back in Choctaw, Okla., and we have some cages like that at the Plant-a-Row garden, but these were staked with those steel T-bar fence posts. No matter how top-heavy the plants get, or what kind of storm blows through, those cages are staying upright!

The trick is getting those posts back out of the ground at the end of the season. These guys have a machine to do that, but if I used these at home, they might be in place permanently.



These two gardeners are great at succession planting, too. In the picture below, some kind of Southern peas is nearing maturity on the right, but the just-planted soybeans have a long way to go. The gardeners planted these for edamame, which is pretty popular and high in protein.



I have no idea how many pounds of sweet potatoes this wide row (below) is going to produce, but it's going to be a lot. Looking down these rows made my garden at home seem pretty puny. Keeping this up has to be a lot of work, and the two men admitted to working hard, but they also said it's their relaxation after a day at work, or on the weekend.



They've planted lots of different kinds of peppers, and they were all beautiful.



The peppers, though, are all in raised beds. The two men said that they were going to be planting more in raised beds to help drainage. Some parts of the property stay wet too long after a rain, and they are thinking that raised beds are the way to go, to eliminate this problem. For irrigation now, the garden uses well water that flows through pipes the men laid themselves, to overhead sprinklers they set up themselves.



My pictures of the okra didn't turn out well enough to post (it was getting dark...), but the okra was amazing. The variety was Clemson spineless, the same variety we use at the Plant-a-Row garden, but theirs was bushy and less than four feet tall, even though it was obvious from the thickness of the stems that the plants were very mature.

At the Plant-a-Row garden, our big problem with Clemson spineless is that it gets way up over eight feet tall and is hard to harvest, as a result.

I asked about the short okra, and Mr. Hankerson said they prune it early in the season. This makes it short and bushy. The bushiness makes it even more productive, because pods form on every branch. It really was amazing.

Corn was growing in a big raised bed, and the men said that cucumbers had already finished and been pulled out. I don't remember right now what else I saw, but there was a lot.

The book that the two men have relied on over the years for gardening advice is Garden Way's Joy of Gardening by Dick Raymond. It seems to have worked well for them.

Report from Hotlanta

When we first moved here (back in 1990), a lot of Atlanta's advertising included the word Hotlanta as a substitute for the city name. I never really understood why they would advertise that sometimes it gets uncomfortably hot here, but I am not in marketing.

This summer has been particularly hot, so it should be no surprise that some of my garden crops aren't doing as well as I would prefer. The cucumbers, in particular, are pretty much dead:



One of my friends asked today whether any of the flowers on her plants would actually set fruit in this heat (we've had a lot of days in a row with highs in the mid-to-high-90s). The answer is, "it depends." Tomatoes don't usually set new fruit in this kind of heat, but they will keep on maturing fruits that have already formed (if they don't cook right on the plant).

Specifically, though, she wanted to know about cucumbers. My experience with cucumbers, ones that are actually still alive and flowering in high heat, is that they might set a few fruits, but that the cukes that form will be oddly shaped from the uneven pollination that will occur. Pepper plants, though, and maybe the eggplants, which are much more heat loving than other crops, are more likely to keep on fruiting through the heat.

I say that, of course, while my own eggplants look like heck. They do have fruits on them, though!



And while the cucumber vines are definitely "done" in my yard, other plants seem to be just fine, even in the heat. I have created a planting calendar for my fall garden, based on times to maturity and counting back from the first frost day, that has Swiss chard as being planted in July and August. However, I had a space back in June and decided to plant some chard seeds then, and the little plants look just fine.



By the time the weather starts to moderate in mid-September, these will be eating size. Apparently, chard can be planted all summer long, and I need to revise my planting calendar.

The Malabar spinach, which shares a trellis with the dead cucumbers, is doing well in the heat, too. I haven't eaten any, yet, but we have a stir-fry planned for later this week, and some leaves will be going into that meal.



Elsewhere in the garden, peppers are green and growing, just like they are supposed to be in the heat.



And the Heritage red raspberries are putting out their second flush of fruits.

Back from Colorado

We've been to Boulder, CO, to visit our oldest son who is in graduate school at CU. The trip included lots of hiking, and some pretty funny moments involving one slightly chubby mom (me!) and some very steep hiking trails. Here I am with my oldest son:



Getting up onto the ledge was easier than getting back down.

While I was gone, a Very Good Friend came by to water my plants and check on the garden (Thank you, Cheryl!). The weather here while I was gone was HOT, so she came by every day to make sure that the plants growing in containers hadn't all cooked right in their pots. I was happy to see that she had kept things harvested. Steady harvesting leads to more production, for many crops!

One of the crops she checked on (and watered) was my laundry basket of straw that had been inoculated with oyster mushroom spawn. I have a shiitake log out in the back yard that is a year and a half old and has yet to produce mushrooms, but I started this laundry basket just about 10 days before heading out for our trip. Look at it now!:



I put the basket together at a cultivation workshop with the Mushroom Club of Georgia. The workshop was a lot of fun, and these mushrooms are very good to eat. Joe thinks they are more tasty than chanterelles!

Also while we were gone, the limes matured enough for eating. When we got back, there were 28 limes on my tree. There are fewer now, because we've brought some in to the kitchen (for cucumber/tomato/sweet pepper salad, all chopped up small, with lime juice and olive oil; on the oyster mushrooms; in iced tea). This pretty good level of production may be enough that the rest of my family will tolerate the little tree's living in the dining room, by the back door, all winter long, in spite of its thorns.

Squash Tales

This is a picture of my sister-in-Louisiana's garden. The last time I actually saw the space it currently occupies, I was helping my sister mark out the garden with stakes and string and then spraying the spiky weeds that lived there with RoundUp. I am so glad she sent me a picture! It looks a lot like I imagined it, and the plants look great.

My sister has bought most of her seeds at the local "feed & seed" store, but some plants were given to her by a friend who is a Very Long Time Gardener (decades). One plant that he gave my sister to grow was supposed to be a cucumber, but the plant is producing zucchini.

This would normally be fine, except that my sister's husband really does not like zucchini. This particular plant is growing and producing like crazy. When my sister was telling me about it, I was reminded of a cat we used to know. This cat wasn't especially social, but it seemed to know when someone was around who didn't like cats. He would hone in on the cat-disliker and hop into the person's lap and just purr away.

The cat pretty much ignored all the rest of the people, who all liked cats, who might be nearby.

This squash plant is like that cat. It is producing abundantly, copiously, for a family in which the man of the house has to actually leave the house when squash is on the stove, because the aroma of its cooking is so overwhelming for him.

Of course, the zucchini in my yard, longed-for as the plants matured and treasured when the squash were finally produced, have all keeled over (weeks ago!) from the squash vine borers.

However, at the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden where I volunteer, one of our gardeners went through the squash patch and carefully sliced open infested stems, pulled out the larvae of the squash vine borers, then covered the wounded stems with dirt. Many of these plants have continued to produce squash for weeks beyond what we would normally expect, so squash-stem surgery is going to be a standard treatment in the upcoming years!