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Quick garden update

The Big Hole That Was A Swimming Pool Once Upon A Time is getting filled. It's kinda right in the middle of the main garden. We planted around it this year.. but.. Time to make it not a thing. This is all old rotten fir, or at least mostly with the exception of one big chunk of oak that snuck in when I was moving logs at dark-o-thirty at night, so it'll break down fairly fast for the most part (some of the limbs will stick around for a big but the bulk is already rotten enough I can mostly just kick it apart). Old punky wood like this has fabulous water retention characteristics, it's been over a month since it rained and it's mostly still sopping wet. So once I cover this with dirt it'll work as a planting space for deep rooted stuff like tomatoes really well for a few years.

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Bonus proof of greenhouse

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Squash corn and melon patch is chugging along

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Melons are off of the hook.. there's like 2-3 per square foot.. possibly hundreds! I've never seen them this prolific before.

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Beaker cat doing what a Beaker cat does checking out the melon patch with us.

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Squash are looking pretty good as well. Looking forward to some Candy Roasters.

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Ted Calver said:
Anything not doing as well as you hoped?
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Well... yes...

The locally sourced sweet sourghum seeds from a seed saver exchange we planted a bit late and they have been taking their sweeeeet time to get anywhere. I'm tentatively hopeful that we get enough to produce seed for a real patch next year. We'll see...

We learned that watermelon starts don't like heat mats.. cooks their tootsies... and they all fall down.. so whether we get any watermelon at all this year is kind of up in the air. That was pretty much a self own but not something I actually knew before, lesson learned. OTOH the planted in place melons are also being super slow (water and otherwise). I think that's the cool nights so they're having trouble getting going. The started ones are gangbusters though.

We ended up with some worms in some of the radishes and cabbage roots... but wire worms on a new garden just planted in old sod is fully expected so no real surprise there. We applied nematodes last fall and will probably repeat that this year to help control them. I suspect the ones we applied are still helping.. but it does take a couple of years to get there.

We've had some problems with the main garden being a bit heavy clay which is either rock hard or mucky. Plus a lot of weed pressure there from years of not being managed. Despite that it's been doing reasonably well production wise although it'd do better with more work on it for sure. The spots where I heavily mulched it with leavings from the old pig pen have done a lot better there, so I'm planning to move more mulch in this fall and we'll see where it goes.

The old flower garden has various soil problems.. lack of organics mostly. It doesn't hold moisture for beans and also gets super dry/hard. So a lot of the stuff we've tried to put in up there has struggled pretty badly. It was the only really fenced spot when we moved here and last years small amount of gardening was kind of a bust with the issues there. The rhubarb starts are liking it though (did you know that if you plant 30 rhubarb seeds.. they might ALL sprout! turns out germination was way better than anticipated.. yeah.. IDK what we're going to do with it all either). All of the old actual garden spaces have clay soil problems to some degree. The lower field I posted above is better as it's old bottom land that was used as pasture and then sat fallow for years.

Darren Wright said:
Seen any veggie predators out in the patches?
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The wild turkeys don't seem to mind the electric fence to much or at least I've seen them walk under it while 4.5kv was most definitely going through it (as per my fence tester..)! It seems like they can be a bit hard on baby plants in some cases. They haven't been an overwhelming problem though and they DO also eat bugs and slugs so it's been a kind of tentative live and let live sort of situation.

I had to do an emergency "fencing" of the greenhouse last week, the tomatoes are just getting ripe and I guess the deer can smell that or something? Anyway we had a browser come in and luckily only topped the very top of a few plants. I used some webbing we had left from what I used to strap the plastic down to make a quick mesh for the still-open end walls (I'll make a plastic cover before winter but right now it's protected enough w/o them and that allows breeze and pollinators to get through.. I'm planning to make the end walls also roll up somehow...).

Gophers are .. ongoing.. I've had limited luck catching them here (not enough time to really intensively trap them) although one cat has developed a taste for the critters so that's helping. They haven't been disastrous.. yet..

Some flea beetles in the main garden, we're managing those with occasional diatomaceous dusting.

The massive influx of cliff swallows every year has 100% helped the bug issues. I need to build more nesting boxes as well. The bats at night are good for some as well (ditto on more boxes).
 
Ryan Mooney said:
Gophers are .. ongoing.. I've had limited luck catching them here (not enough time to really intensively trap them) although one cat has developed a taste for the critters so that's helping. They haven't been disastrous.. yet..
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We had one of those cats when we were kids. On occasion, Mumcat (mother of all the barn cats) would drop groundhog "offerings" at my mother's feet.
 
Ryan Mooney said:
...Gophers are .. ongoing.. I've had limited luck catching them here (not enough time to really intensively trap them) although one cat has developed a taste for the critters so that's helping. They haven't been disastrous.. yet...
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When I was a kid we used to have a gopher problem in our alfalfa fields. The fields were flood irrigated and a gopher hole could drain a large section of the field and often resulted in a large washout elsewhere in adjacent fields. When a "gopher drain" hole was discovered, my dad's method for plugging the hole was to stuff a large plastic feed bag into the hole with a shovel handle. One day he was in a field, standing in a couple of inches of water in his muck boots, shoving a bag deep into a hole. He felt something on the back of his foot and looked down to see a gopher gnawing away on the back of his boot. The gopher died from a shovel guillotine. 🤣
 
And the deer apparently figured out where the fence was kinda low and not great around the upper garden last night and snagged themselves a few tomatoes and soy bean tops. Reinforcing with another layer of hog wire I found out in the barn.

I swear they can smell ripe tomatoes. We didn’t have any problems until they started turning red. Worth thinking about anyway.
 
Sourghum is chugging along.. That's it dead center. Hasn't started tassling yet but I have some hope we'll at least get seeds still. It was planted a bit late but.. we'll see..

Two of the three dry corn patches (the Mandan Purple and Painted Mountain) are in full tassle/early silk. The larger Hopi blue corn (derivative. it's been crossed back with a few other things and heavily rogued back out.. this is the largest patch I've been able to do for a few years..) is lagging a bit.. I suspect we'll have to hang it in the barn to get it to dry down .. probably..

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Getting some proper throwing tomatoes..

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Also picked the first two melons and ate them this morning.. The late watermelon is juuust starting to put on so if we get any it'll be a fall crop.

Pulled the first of the spuds this morning as well, not looking to bad. I need to keep some notes on what's determinate vs indeterminate there. Makes a big difference in harvest time.
 
Spud stats.

Planted 21 varieties.. 250 row feet. Average yield/lb planted was 14lbs.. best was 28!! worst was 3.5. Yield per row/ft was 1.25 and varied between 0.58 and 2.33/ft. Total potatoes harvested 315lbs not counting some we stole from the plants over the summer probably another 15-20lbs.. I reckon we're good on spuds for the winter.

Was kind of interesting harvesting that many different kinds of potatoes, some grow a lot differently than others. Some of the fingerlings were really easy to pick they bunched up around the stem really nicely so you don't have to dig so much. One of the purple ones was ALL OVER so I had to dig out quite a ways on either side of the plant which was substantially more work.

Major factors affecting yield seem to be roughly in order:
  • Variety, some types are just hugely more productive than others (which those will be likely depends on where you are..).
  • Water, potatoes like early and regular water. Some large chunk of the patch didn't get enough early water because we kept hoping for spring rains that never happened. Some varieties seem more fussy about that than others...
  • Soil, which is really probably #1 but all things being equal there was some variance depending on local soil quality.
  • Plant management, whether this matters or not varies. I top dressed everything with a heavy (6") mulch of dry grass in lieu of actually hilling. For some types this was fine. Some of the other kinds were trying to put on stolons higher up the plant and would surely have benefited from a good hilling (especially the fingerlings in general, the gold types not so much).
On the melon front we were up to 20+ per week for a while.. It's starting to taper off pretty good now though. Luckily we found a few neighbors who also like them :D.

Took the first tractor load of squash up to the barn to cure last week.. Some of the other varieties are still ripening so I'm leaving them on the plant a bit longer to squeeze out as much as I can.

The dry corn.. we'll see.. it's definitely a race against the rains here to dry it down. I may end up hanging a fair bit of it in the barn to dry as well..
 
Ryan Mooney said:
Spud stats.

Planted 21 varieties.. 250 row feet. Average yield/lb planted was 14lbs.. best was 28!! worst was 3.5. Yield per row/ft was 1.25 and varied between 0.58 and 2.33/ft. Total potatoes harvested 315lbs not counting some we stole from the plants over the summer probably another 15-20lbs.. I reckon we're good on spuds for the winter.

Was kind of interesting harvesting that many different kinds of potatoes, some grow a lot differently than others. Some of the fingerlings were really easy to pick they bunched up around the stem really nicely so you don't have to dig so much. One of the purple ones was ALL OVER so I had to dig out quite a ways on either side of the plant which was substantially more work.

Major factors affecting yield seem to be roughly in order:
  • Variety, some types are just hugely more productive than others (which those will be likely depends on where you are..).
  • Water, potatoes like early and regular water. Some large chunk of the patch didn't get enough early water because we kept hoping for spring rains that never happened. Some varieties seem more fussy about that than others...
  • Soil, which is really probably #1 but all things being equal there was some variance depending on local soil quality.
  • Plant management, whether this matters or not varies. I top dressed everything with a heavy (6") mulch of dry grass in lieu of actually hilling. For some types this was fine. Some of the other kinds were trying to put on stolons higher up the plant and would surely have benefited from a good hilling (especially the fingerlings in general, the gold types not so much).
On the melon front we were up to 20+ per week for a while.. It's starting to taper off pretty good now though. Luckily we found a few neighbors who also like them :D.

Took the first tractor load of squash up to the barn to cure last week.. Some of the other varieties are still ripening so I'm leaving them on the plant a bit longer to squeeze out as much as I can.

The dry corn.. we'll see.. it's definitely a race against the rains here to dry it down. I may end up hanging a fair bit of it in the barn to dry as well..
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Good report! That’s some serious potato growing.
How do you store them?
 
Peter Rideout said:
How do you store them?
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That’s a whole other story. Ideally I’d have a good root cellar but the ground water level gets really high here in the winter and I haven’t figured out where and how to build one that’d deal with that yet. It’ll probably be something above ground maybe rammed earth.

In drier climates I’ve gotten away with a redneck pit cellar with the spuds on a raised floor in the bottom and covered with a piece of plywood and a few bales. That was good to -20F although you wouldn’t want to open it much when it’s that cold. Here they’d be swimming for the exit before November.

So I harvested some a bit early (late August) and tried raised straw mounds covered in two layers of cardboard and then some dirt. I pulled those out as well yesterday to see how that was going. They survived one drenching rain pretty well, but the straw was definitely getting pretty musty and I think you’d want something better than the cardboard for much longer than that. They’d also benefit from some more breathing otherwise I think they’d sprout in there before too long. Plus it’s not super easy to get at them.

So for this year I’ve cleared a space under one of the lean-to’s and I put down two large pallets then built a straw hut on top of that with one layer of bales for the floor, then two layers stacked on edge to make the walls, some 2x4’s laid across the top supports another layer of bales for the roof. I chinked all of the gaps well with more straw. The door is an old piece of siding. I made a frame for it out of some 2x4’s pinned to the pallets and the roof and then chinked well around the sides. I have a piece of foil and then a styrofoam backer to shove in there as well. It doesn’t generally get really cold here so I think that ought to probably work well enough. We’ll see…

I picked up a stack of mesh bags on sale which have proven really useful for both the potatoes and onions. Not the best quality but cheap enough. So I have them in bags then the bags in boxes then the boxes in the straw bale cellar.
 
Ryan Mooney said:
That’s a whole other story. Ideally I’d have a good root cellar but the ground water level gets really high here in the winter and I haven’t figured out where and how to build one that’d deal with that yet. It’ll probably be something above ground maybe rammed earth.
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I've seen people sink an old chest freezer into the ground with the lid still accessible. Kept cool and the vermin out.
 
Ted Calver said:
Refresh my memory. What are your plans for 300lbs of potatoes? Eat, sell, trade?
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Right here.. My Mouth!

It is a bit more than the two of us will likely eat though lol. I'll hook some friends and neighbors up with some and we'll eat a bunch and next year I'll likely plant even more way to much again repeating the cycle...

Partially I was trialing a bunch of varieties this year.. which you really need at least 10' or so of row per to really give them a go. But I also don't think I got a good and fair trial for various reasons (water and soil amendments both put on way to late, not enough hilling, etc..) and one year could just be a one-off due to very local conditions (there's an interesting variation in moisture in the patch we planted in I've been trying to figure out - there's one damp spot running kinda through the middle of it..). Soooo I feel kind of obligated to plant the same next year... If I correct the issues I wouldn't be surprised to hit 500lbs.. at which point we'll have to figure out something.

Brent Dowell said:
I've seen people sink an old chest freezer into the ground with the lid still accessible. Kept cool and the vermin out.
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I've used those for storing grain as well for keeping the critters out. I think I'd still have to put it above ground and mound it or something. The ground water level here is basically "surface water" for a few months in the winter. I'm also lacking good hills with decent drainage in close proximity to the buildings...
 
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