Chipmunks in the Sweet Potatoes

One night last week when I headed out to check the garden, I saw two chipmunks racing out of the sweet potato patch, with their tails at an unusually saucy, jaunty angle. The little critters looked way too happy to me, so I pulled back some vines in the area they seemed to have come from.

Chipmunk excavation in the sweet potato patch.

The rascals had been mining the garden! I found numerous excavations, all right at the bases of plants, so I decided to dig up all the sweet potatoes at my first opportunity.

That chance came on Sunday, and it turned out that the chipmunks had eaten pretty nearly all the sweet potatoes from the end of the garden nearest the creek.

There were a few, very small Porto Rican Golds and a few small sweets from the Annie Hall area. There won't be enough of the Porto Rican for me to eat any, but I might get to eat one of the Annie Hall.

Another chipmunk entrance to the sweet potato mine.

In better news, there seem to be plenty of the Purple Delight and plenty of Beauregard at the far end of the sweet potato bed. I haven't weighed the harvest yet; I know there will be less total weight than I had hoped for, but at least I didn't get totally "skunked" (or, in this case, "chipmunked").

The chipmunk discovery meant that I harvested my sweet potato patch a couple of weeks sooner than usual; typically, I don't dig the sweets up until sometime in October. If anyone out there is worried about running behind schedule in harvesting sweet potatoes -- don't worry -- you aren't! I am just early.

Hope all the other sweet potato patches have managed to escape the notice of the chipmunks!

Garden Update

September peppers.

There haven't been many photos in the blog lately, because I've had camera "issues." At this point, those issues are mostly resolved, so I finally went outside in daylight to take some pictures for a simple garden update.

The summer crop that is still coming in strong is the peppers. All varieties across the whole bed are doing well. The tomatoes, even the ones planted latest, are mostly limping along. I'm bringing in a few tomatoes each week, but not great piles of them like I would normally be harvesting in September.

Buckwheat cover crop, ready to be mowed down.

The buckwheat that was planted across the top of the spinach-beet bed is doing great. Soon, I will be mowing that down (or Joe will, with the weed-whacker), then turning it under to get the space ready for a winter cover crop.

Some animal(s) out in the yard have been treating the rows of spinach and beet seedlings like a personal snack bar, and I may, as a result, end up reseeding all those rows. This is an annoying turn of events, but not a total surprise. A creek borders our yard on one side, which means we have plenty of drop-in "guests" of the four-legged, furry persuasion. The creek is like a natural highway that connects parks and fields in the area. My yard is just a scenic-turnout that happens to also include a couple of fast-food establishments.

Cabbage-family snacks for rabbits.

 The cabbage and broccoli plants have established nicely and have begun to really grow, but the little green stick front-and-center of the photo to the left is the remains of another animal snack -- kind of like a broccoli-sicle stick instead of a popsicle stick.

However, I have another nine-pack of broccoli to plant, and it is enough to replace all of the most severely munched plants, with some left to plant further down the bed.

Healthy horseradish.

The horseradish, that we don't even really like to eat, is looking pretty amazing. The friend who gave me the chunk of root with which to start my plant said that the flowers would be lovely, but I haven't seen any flowers yet. I've had the plant for at least three years, so I'm thinking that I might not get to see flowers.

The plant is getting too big for its pot, and I'm expecting to re-pot it this coming spring, dividing the root to share and to make some horseradish sauce. Maybe I'll find a recipe for sauce that we like!

This year, most of my plants were in the ground, but I have seen horseradish so healthy that it threatened to take over whole yards. Mine is going to stay in a pot.

Over in the side yard, the sweet potato vines seem to be contemplating some kind of take-over. They have flowed into the next bed and across the newly-laid centipede-&-nutsedge sod that the water department put down after replacing the neighborhood water mains.

This year's sweet-potato glacier, slowly creeping across the yard.

In the picture to the right, a few okra plants can be seen along the left of the photo; they are holding their own among the vines and producing just enough okra for us to include some in a meal every few days.

It will be time to dig up those sweet potatoes very soon. I'm planning to manage that sometime in the first week of October. The slips were planted back in May, which means the plants have had PLENTY of time to make sweets for me by now.

Carrots to the left, winter radishes to the right.

The carrot and winter radish bed looks pretty good. There are still some places in the rows where carrots didn't come up, and it isn't too late to drop in a few seeds in those gaps. We are getting rain today, so it will have to be on another day, but I am thinking that there is still time for a few very late carrots.

The last seeds in won't yield mature carrots until sometime in the spring, but that's okay. I will have harvested plenty of other carrots by then, from the earlier-planted seeds.

Hope everyone else's gardens are doing well!

Growing Your Own: When Memories Collide

When I was at a gardening event in late spring, I was given a packet of Mississippi Silver Cowpeas by one of the exhibitors. I already grow two varieties of cowpeas, so I passed this packet along to another gardener. I spoke last week with the gardener, and it was easy to see that, for him, the peas brought up both good and bad memories.

He told about looking out over his father's field when he was a boy, seeing the stems of the cowpeas standing straight up with the pods sticking out at right angles, and knowing that he would soon be out in the field, under the hot summer sun, picking those pods. It was backbreaking work. Then he would spend HOURS shelling out the peas. Watching those Mississippi Silver peas grow and mature in the garden this year reminded him of that set of chores that he had dreaded as a boy.

However, after he'd shelled out the mature peas, he knew that they would have the flavor that was missing from the black-eye peas available in stores. The Mississippi Silvers were the "real thing." He had missed that flavor, and it turns out that a good way to get it is to grow your own.

I didn't have that particular childhood experience, but the first time I grew and prepared Pigott Family cowpeas, I knew that I wouldn't be going back to the bagged black-eye peas from the grocery store anytime soon. Luckily, even though I can grow only a couple of quarts of (dried) peas in my little garden, the farm where Joe and I volunteer on Saturdays grows plenty (this year it was Colossus, but that variety is still pretty good).

For a lot of people, beginning to grow some of their own food is a response to economic difficulties (either present or anticipated) or to concern over environmental problems related to large-scale agriculture, but there are some good, positive reasons for growing your own, too. One of those is the reward of exceptional flavor. Another, for some, is a childhood memory brought to life.

Fall Planting, Continued

I've made more progress in getting the fall crops planted, but I am beginning to fall behind. It's almost mid-September!

Last Saturday morning, I planted 102 cabbage-family plants out at the little farm on Dallas Highway where I volunteer. Joe was out of town, and most of the rest of the volunteers had been busy on the tractors the day before. That left just me to prepare the beds, space the transplants, make the holes, set in the little plants, water, then give each plant a shot of fish-emulsion as starter fertilizer. Can I just mention here that I was pretty tired after that long morning? 

In my own yard, I worked on clearing away the parching corn and preparing that space for planting. Then yesterday after work I managed to get my cabbages and broccoli in the ground.  Rabbits had eaten the tops off of most of the little plants that I had started from seed  -- I had set the tray of plants out in the yard, where the seedlings would get plenty of sunshine -- which means that about 3/4 of those plants in my garden now are from a garden center. This morning, though, they all still look good.

The carrots, winter radishes, beets, spinach, and patch of buckwheat (as a cover crop) that were planted earlier are up and growing. There are a few gaps here and there in the rows of vegetables where I will need to put in a little more seed, but not many.  The long stretch of rain that we had this year has made it seem weird to have to water the seedlings, but that's what I've had to do -- stand out in the yard with a hose to make sure the little seedlings don't dry up and blow away.

I still need to get the lettuce (and other various) seedlings into the ground, and I have some other seeds to plant. If all goes well, I'll manage to finish it all sometime this coming weekend.

Meanwhile, the patch of green beans that I planted in early July is providing plenty of beans, there are still peppers and tomatoes coming in, the eggplants look as though they are putting on a new flush of flowers, the sweet potato vines are sprawled all over the place, and just looking at all that exuberant growth makes me smile.

Hope everyone else's fall planting is on track!

Managing the Harvest

There's a post up at one of my frequently-visited news sites, Resilience.Org, about the frustrations of a gardener who can find plenty of information about sustainable (and small/urban) farming, but not all that much to help him in sustainable gardening.

The article by Erik Curran, "Sustainable Farming Mania is Frustrating Me," was originally published at Transition Voice.

He points out that there is a lot of information available right now (for example) about  the usefulness on small farms of including animals in the loop, which, as a suburban gardener, he just can't manage. As for many of the rest of us, keeping chickens and other livestock is not legal where he lives. This isn't the only sustainable-farming method/tool that doesn't apply to his little garden, but it's one he mentions.

A second, huge issue seems to be about handling the super-abundance of tomatoes (and other vegetables) that won't wait until he actually has the time to process them into a storage-able form. As someone who has spent time canning innumerable tomatoes in years past, I can sympathize. When we lived on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, we brought in tomatoes by the 5-gallon-bucketful (Every day! Day after day...). Over time, I've learned to plant fewer tomato plants.

Besides learning to "just say no" to too many tomato plants, part of the answer to managing the harvest at our house has been the use of a dehydrator. Canning take a lot of time and our full attention, but we can slice tomatoes, dice peppers, and cut up other fruits and veggies while watching something on Netflix ("Star Trek" episodes, Ken Burns' "The Dust Bowl," BBC's "Rosemary & Thyme"), let it dry in the dehydrator overnight, then store the dried produce in canning jars until we need it. This time of year, the dehydrator is "on" several nights each week.

Another part of the answer has been to plant some crops that don't need a lot of special processing for storage. This strategy saves a lot of time. Winter squash, onions, potatoes, garlic, shallots, sweet potatoes, and the kinds of corn that are stored dry -- the ones that are for popping, parching, or grinding into flour -- are stored pretty much "as is." No chopping or blanching is required. Cowpeas and other beans need minimal processing; they can be shelled when dry, left for a few days in a thin layer on something like cookie sheets to make sure they are Really Dry, then stored in canning jars like the other dried veggies.

Another part of the answer at our house has been to stagger the planting of big producers like tomatoes so that we are not overwhelmed. The former mountains of ripe tomatoes have become more manageable hills that appear sporadically all the way to the first frost. Right now in my yard, we are in a bit of a lull with regard to tomatoes, but there are two plants of paste-type tomatoes (Wuhib), planted in June, that currently are loaded with green fruits that will begin ripening soon. I've pulled up most of the earliest-planted tomatoes that had slowed in production due to disease issues (the Amish tomatoes are still in the ground and producing, and a late-planted cherry tomato is just now kicking in).

Managing the planting with the end in mind is hardest for new gardeners who haven't yet experienced how much food a tomato plant or a short row of pole beans can produce. Hopefully, the demanding piles of fresh food won't deter new gardeners from trying again in following years, with slight alterations in the mix and timing of the planting.

Tracking the Harvest: July and August, 2013

The rainy weather has definitely affected my garden crops, in some ways good and some bad. We had a great summer for cucumbers and zucchini, but the tomatoes have been miserable.

Usually, we get blueberries for two or three (sometimes four!) weeks before the birds find them and our picking is over for the summer. This year the blueberries were late but the birds were right on time, so we got very few of the blueberries. None made it into the freezer.

We've had some figs, but the bush is one of the several plants that were smashed when our neighbor's oak tree fell on our house last summer, so the bush is busier with getting new stems and leaves than with making fruit, and then, of course, there are the birds...

However, the numbers don't look too bad:
 

July 49.85 kg = 109 pounds, 14 ounces

August 34.65 kg = 76 pounds, 6 ounces

Running total January through August = 144.25 kg =  318 pounds,  3 ounces

The breakdown by crop, measured in kilograms, is pasted below.

July

Tomatoes	21.35
Shallots	3.75
0kra	0.4
Cucumbers	12.05
Eggplants	1.15
Berries, misc.	1.05
Bush beans, green	1.65
Peppers	5.5
zucchini	2.7
Swiss chard	0.25

August

Tomatoes	7.55
Peppers	7.15
Figs	1.4
Melon	2.45
Eggplants	1.7
Zucchini	2.1
Butternut squash, dwarf	3.5
Cucumbers	6.45
Okra	1.25
Bush beans, green	1.1

Hope everyone else's gardens are going well!

Benefits of Crop Rotation

I have understood for a pretty long time that crop rotation, which involves the practice of NOT planting the same crop (or crops in one plant family) in the same location year after year, is important for a variety of reasons.

One reason is that plants in one family often are attacked by the same pests and diseases. Rotating out of a particular space, and planting crops from a different family there instead, can help reduce the buildup of diseases and pests that attack crops in one plant family.

Another reason is that plants in one family often make similar nutrient demands on the soil. Jessica Strickland of North Carolina Cooperative Extension, in a May 2013 article, wrote:

"Vegetables in the same family are similar in the amount of nutrients they extract from the soil, so over time planting the same vegetables in the same spot can reduce certain nutrients in the soil. If the same family of vegetables is planted every year in the same location, insect and disease problems continue to increase and soil fertility drops. Using pesticides and fertilizer could provide little help but over time they would not be able to keep up with the increasing problems."

Also, rotating to some particular crops can help reduce a pest problem that already has built up to damaging levels. An example pest is root knot nematodes, which can lower productivity of a crop pretty dramatically - if they don't actually kill the plants outright. A population of these soil-dwelling pests can be lowered by planting a bed solidly in one of the nematode-repelling marigolds or in a grass-family crop like rye, wheat, or oats.

What I didn't know until recently is the effect of crop rotation on the diversity of soil microbial life, the maintenance of which is so integral to successful organic gardens. In the Science Daily article "Why crop rotation works: Change in crop species causes shift in soil microbes", Professor Philip Poole of the John Innes Centre in England is quoted as saying,

"Changing the crop species massively changes the content of microbes in the soil, which in turn helps the plant to acquire nutrients, regulate growth and protect itself against pests and diseases, boosting yield."

Professor Poole added: "While continued planting of one species in monoculture pulls the soil in one direction, rotating to a different one benefits soil health."

Yet another good reason to plan a careful rotation in the veggie patch.

Planting the Fall Garden Continues

After getting the last few weeds out of the former squash/melon bed, I dumped a wheelbarrow-load of compost on top of the bed, spread it across the entire surface, worked the whole bed over with my grub hoe, tossed on some kelp and cottonseed meal, raked/pounced the amendments into the top couple of inches, used my widest short-tine rake to smooth the top, then got busy planting.

The above set of tasks is why gardening isn't for those who require instant gratification; very little about gardening is instant! Getting the bed prepared (not including pulling out the old crops, which I had already done) took awhile. Getting it planted took about five minutes.

I used my seeder to plant two rows of spinach (mixed with some regular radish seeds) and two rows of beets. Those four rows went along the edge nearest the house. This particular bed is fairly wide, so the farther half was broadcast with buckwheat, for a fast cover crop while I am waiting for time to plant a longer-term, winter cover in that space.

My seedlings (currently in little pots) for the cabbage family plants and the lettuces (and etc.) are coming along nicely, but their spaces won't be vacant for another week or two. I think they will be fine, but I will be happier when they are safely in the ground.

The carrots and winter-radishes came up just fine on their own, but no rain is in the forecast for the next several days, so I might actually need to water the spinach, beet, and buckwheat seeds to keep them damp enough to germinate.

Hope that everyone else's fall planting is on track!

Squash, Melon Update

The melons have pretty much been a bust this year. I have brought one into the kitchen, but the rest of what I would normally expect to harvest from the plants in the garden either never formed, were bored/gnawed into by bugs/caterpillars, or are just beginning to form now, when the vines are far enough gone with Downy Mildew that the fruits are not going to reach maturity before the vines die.

This will add another year to my de-hybridization project for the canary melons,  but at least I got to enjoy one of my favorite melons this year. I am saving seed from my lone melon, with a note that it was produced in a horrifically wet, cool summer. These seeds may be useful someday.

Considering how rough the summer has been on the melons, I am happy to be able to report that the butternut squash seem to be doing well enough. From the three vines, I've brought in six squash, lost a few to pickleworms, and there are a few more on the way.

Butternut changes from green, to whitish, and then to tan when mature.

Butternut is one of the confusing category of squashes called "Winter squash." It isn't grown in the winter; it is planted in spring, pretty much when the zucchini go in the ground. The name comes from the way the squash keep through the winter without much special help. They just need a cool, out of the way spot to hang out, and they will be in good shape well into February and beyond.

In truth, they won't even be that great to eat until they've done some of that "hanging out" for awhile. The sugars develop over time, and it can take a month or so for them to reach their flavor peak.

Soon, I will be clearing the bed that currently holds the melon and butternut squash plants, regardless of whether all the squash have matured. It's time to get more of my cool-season seeds into the ground!

I Planted Carrots

This was a busy weekend of tidying up, amending, and planting. The bed that got "tidied" (everything pulled out) was the one that had held the zucchini and most of the cucumbers. After pulling up the old plants, I spread a wheelbarrow load of compost over the bed and then used my grub hoe to "till" the bed. If the bed hadn't been for carrots, I probably wouldn't have worked it so deeply, but I wanted the roots to have no trouble growing long and straight.

After raking the bed smooth, I added a little of my own mix of organic amendments, then sifted those into the top few inches of soil before planting.

One of the great things about planting the carrots is that I get to use my seeder. Most of my crops aren't planted directly into the garden as seeds so solidly in the beds, but carrots are. It's always fun to roll that seeder down the row, and great to know that the seeds are planted with pretty good spacing at the depth that I want, covered up and tamped down, all in one pass!

Grub hoe and seeder help make short work of planting the carrots. PHOTO/atlantaveggies@blogspot.com

I planted five rows of carrots and then one row of winter radishes.

The day wasn't super hot -- only in the 80s -- but it was humid and still, so in the mid-afteroon -- rather than working out in the blazing hot sun -- I worked on the shady front porch on transplants for the beds that aren't far enough along to clear for fall planting.  I started a tray of fall greens and bumped up my cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower seedlings into larger pots.

Meanwhile, the summer crops are coming in at a good pace. I'm especially happy about the success of the peppers. We've been putting a couple of pounds of them, chopped, into the dehydrator each week for awhile now, and they will make our winter meals very tasty.

A day's August harvest in a rainy garden year.  PHOTO/atlantaveggies.blogspot.com

Hope everyone else's gardens are doing well!

Zucchini in August? It's a Miracle!

Tattered squash stem from Vine Borer activity.

The state of the main stems of these plants makes the late summer zucchini harvest even more of a miracle. 

Squash vine borers have made a mess out of each of the stems, which are looking all tattered and worn out. The borers are very thorough in their work!

Apparently. though, the plants still have enough life in them to support a little more zucchini.

I'm pretty sure that these few squash (pictures below) really are the last efforts at producing fruits for these plants, but I have never had zucchini planted in April still productive this late in the summer.

I'd like to think that it's because I'm such a great gardener, but it's probably just dumb luck.

When I saw the very first evidence, back in June, of borer activity on the stems (little piles of frass), I slit the stems open with a sharp knife and sprayed the insides of each stem, soaked them, really, with Bt for caterpillars.

A great looking late-summer zucchini.

Then I sprayed the stems thoroughly, up to the point where new flowers were opening; then I piled compost onto the lower parts of the stems where I had done my little bit of surgery.

Regardless of whether my little effort made any difference, we are enjoying our zucchini, and will continue to enjoy it every day until it's gone.

Hope there are some nice surprises in all the other gardens out there, too!

More zucchini in August. Amazing!

Rain and More Rain

If you are gardening in the South and have yet to bring in a perfect, red tomato, take heart! I have heard from more than one gardener who said that the past couple of days of sunshine helped the green tomatoes on their plants make it to the blushing stage, and they are hoping to harvest one or more actual, ripe tomatoes soon.

Of course, yesterday morning the thermometer on my front porch was showing a temperature of 59 degrees F, and this morning it is raining, yet again. The unusual weather, both cool and wet, that has been ongoing for months, delayed planting in the spring and has caused a lot of trouble in our summer gardens.

As bad as things are for the gardeners, though, they are much worse for the farmers whose livelihoods depend on the success of their crops. Our grocery store shelves depend on them, too!

An article in the New York Times, "With Too Much Rain in the South, Too Little Produce on the Shelves," points out that much of the Southern U.S. has received WAY more rain than usual. Georgia is up by about 34%, and other states aren't far behind.

The vegetables that aren't doing well in gardens are also not doing well on farms. Fruits either explode in the rain or ripen with a bland flavor. Fields are a muddy mess that can't be accessed with the usual heavy equipment. Fertilizers and pesticides can't be deployed because they are spread by some of that heavy equipment. When those are successfully applied to the fields, it rains again.

One of my friends subscribes to a CSA -- she gets a box of vegetables each week from her local farmers, a husband and wife team up in Rockmart, GA, who have been hit hard by the weather. They had to replant some crops more than once in spring (seeds washed away in heavy rains), and the wet weather has brought enough other problems (disease, ripening issues) that they have really struggled to provide vegetables to their share subscribers. My friend says that the farm had to let go more than half of its subscribers, and the website carries a note that the farm won't be offering a fall CSA due to the excessive rain. It seems unlikely that the farmers will be making anything like "a living" this year from the little farm.

Meanwhile, Eastern Australia probably has just had its hottest July ever, and people in Shanghai are dying of heatstroke from "unprecedented summer heat."  Closer to home, "Anchorage has set a record for the most consecutive days over 70 degrees during this unusually warm summer."

People around here like to say, "if you don't like the weather, just wait a minute..." but the weather doesn't seem to be turning on a dime these days. According to Jeff Crouch, a climatologist at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. who was quoted in the top-linked New York Times article, “Whenever we get in a pattern like this, we kind of stay in the status quo,” he said. “When we’re hot and dry, we stay hot and dry. When we’re wet, we stay wet.” 

I'm just about resigned to more of the same - rain and more rain. Let's hope my garden is up to it, too!