Garden is Looking Good

JUNE 30TH:
 POTATOES:  This bed is the best looking potato bed I have ever grown. It is weed free. Plants nicely hilled up and almost bug free.  Yes, for the first time I can easily walk the rows in ten minutes and squish any potato bugs I happen to find. The red potatoes are in the first two rows and are starting to bloom nicely. The picture doesn't show the whole bed but there are seven rows. Helen from the SBGC has helped with this bed a lot and Jennifer and 4 year old Jack from next door help remove bugs.

 SWEET POTATOES:  This long bed has 100 sweet potato "slips" planted in early June. The plants are doing well and it is fairly easy to pull weeds close to the plants and hoe the rest of the bed. In another month the plants will completely cover the entire bed. Sweet potatoes need a long growing season so won't be harvested until late September or beyond. I have had good luck with them in my garden and really love having a supply for much of the winter. Unlike regular potatoes you poke the slips into hole in a high ridge of soil. Other potatoes are planted as pieces of actual potatoes with "eyes" showing and placed in  a trench and over time as the plants grow you fill the trench and then hill up the soil around the plants. Sweet potato plants don't suffer with  potato bugs but last year near harvest time all the leaves were eaten by deer!

 ONIONS & POLE BEANS: This bed has two long rows of onions on the outside edges. I buy onion plants and the total number planted this year is approximately 300. I have had mixed results as to the size of the harvested onion. Usually they aren't very big but last a long time in storage. This year I am determined to keep the bed as weed free as possible and that should improve the size of the onions considerably. In the middle of this bed I have made a climbing structure for pole beans. I am sure they will be climbing well and heading to the top in another month.  Pole beans tend to be much longer beans than the bush variety so I am looking forward to this crop. In the other garden I have bush beans growing and also a pink tip yellow heirloom pole bean. Green and yellow beans freeze easily and so are a winter long treat. I also make Dilly Beans, a pickled canned product.

MORE BEANS & SUNFLOWERS:  This picture doesn't give you much to see but what is visible is the growth of the seeds planted less than two weeks ago. There are fourteen rows planted in this bed. Four of them are various varieties of sunflowers. The rest are various beans. The varieties include lima; black coco; pinto; cannellini; and red kidney beans. The limas will be eaten fresh but the others will become dried beans for winter use. Some friends wonder why I do the dried beans as it is quite a workout to process them. You let the beans stay on the plants until the whole plant is dried up and then pull the entire plant out of the ground. Then you have to, at your leisure, pull the bean pods from the plants. Lastly, you have to separate the dried beans from the pods. This is a good indoor project with friends or family helping though. I love having the varieties of beans and colors in old canning jars sitting on my book shelf. It is also a real treat to decide what bean to soak and then cook on a snowy winter day for a pot of soup or chili. Hence, I don't mind the work involved growing and harvesting them at all. I had a lot of help weeding and planting this bed from another Jennifer...Jen Comeau from my Union Church family.