Yesterday: Potatoes – This Morning: White Dragon
There’s a white dragon that I see from our west vegetable garden. It hovers low along the river. It’s the puffy white snake, kilometers long, that people living beside this stretch of Slocan River see on coolish mornings. On blue-sky mornings. We see it in the morning, and then it leaves.
Slocan River Dragon
I’m lucky to see it to the west. When I go out to open the vents in our greenhouse, or to set a sprinkler on the west garden (what we call “the side garden”), I can watch the dragon.
Big, benign, and cumulus, it goes on its silent singular way. There it is.
Okay, now to harvest some tomatoes in the greenhouse and start the day.
* * * * * *
I harvested potatoes yesterday, as the tops had died down.
I rotate my potato plots. I fertilize with compost, and with rotted steer manure when I can get it (I had some this past spring) – and I amend with greensand, and sulphur to bring the pH down a bit. Plus, every year I sow the potato area, along with the other areas of the larger of our gardens, with fall rye. I till that under in the spring, before planting. In the last four years or so, my harvests have generally been bigger than in the previous 20 years.
It was the Russets that I harvested yesterday. A medium-scale return, not as good as last year’s bonanza, and I’ll attribute that to weather. There were nightcrawlers (some call them “dew worms”) in the soil – a good sign.
I harvested Norland early red potatoes three weeks ago. Next year I think I won’t plant any. The harvest with these is nowhere near as ample, and the tendency to scabbing of the skins is greater. I still have a row of “fingerling” (or “banana” type) potatoes in the ground, since the tops are still green and alive. First time I’ve tried growing them.
My artichokes are forming nicely at this point, some getting toward being large enough to cut off, some still hen’s-egg scale. The tomato production in the greenhouse has been good, though I don’t feel it’s yet hit its peak. Three varieties, and the Romas are so plentiful it’s almost scary.
Filed under: Harvest Lessons, Nature
The recap of your garden is inspiring. I have a small garden in Beasley that my wife and I share with our neighbours.
Being up on the side of a mountain has me antsy about an early frost. Last year we were caught off guard by a frost and lost much of our tomatoes.
It’s tricky gardening on a rental property, as part of me wants to make improvements to increase yield but the other part knows that someday I’ll leave.