Sweet potatoes

Today I dug under two plants and this is what I found by just digging with my hands, wearing gloves of course.  They weighed 4.8625 pounds.  The little one I found a couple of weeks ago would probably have tipped the scale to 5 pounds but I ate it last night.  It was soooo yummy :)  by far the best sweet potato I have ever eaten.

Using 8 foot long X 1" bamboo poles for trellises

I am very happy with the bamboo poles, they are strong and resilient.  At first I was skeptical when the slightest breeze knocked over my bamboo teepees.  But it turns out that after there is some weight pulling downward on them, they will not go anywhere.  We have had a few good windy storms since the trellises have been covered by beans and peas.  Every one of them were still standing after the storms.

Two of the trellises I built have a large load on them and they are still standing same as when I put them up.  They are the Italian beans/peas.  They look kind of wild, like pictures I have seen of kudzu in the south that has covered old buildings, automobiles, trees, etc.   These two rows were planted 3 feet apart and there is barely enough room between them to get in there and pick peas.  There is a canopy over the top between the two rows, made by tendrils from the two rows meeting and grabbing onto each other. 

Update:  First, I may have already added some of this information.  Forgive me if some of this is a repeat.  I have compared pictures of pea and bean varieties and have discovered that these are probably a variety of cow pea.  They look the same as pictures of cow peas I found on google images.

I wasn't going to plant these next year but I have changed my mind.  I picked all of them after they dried, then shelled them and they gave me about 4 pounds of shelled peas. An easy thing to do while watching TV.  And they are delicious.  

With the minimal amount of work involved in planting, harvesting and shelling these peas, I would say they are worth it in addition to all of the produce I gathered from my garden.  These are great for the occasional small pot of bean soup in the winter months.  With them in my diet, it is less boring.  What a treat they are.

Here are my Italian Fagolina cow peas in a gallon freezer bag.  As you can see, comparing them to the dime, they are very small.

Harvesting

It's awesome!  I started picking beans Friday.  I had a nice soup made from green beans, red skinned potatoes and carrots, all from my garden.

Pole beans behind 2 tomato plants

Yesterday I picked more beans and some chard.  There was also some banana peppers, half a green bell pepper, and some okra that a friend gave me.  I cooked it all together and added a little wine and some curry spice.  Oh yummmm it was wonderful.  It made a large pan full so there is more for today and tomorrow too.  I would feel like I was in heaven if I lived somewhere tropical so I could eat fresh from the garden every day like this.

bad pic of my strawberry patch, I was using my phone and couldn't see where it was pointed.  You can see that I have a crab grass problem.

There were also some more strawberries to pick yesterday.  They are almost done producing.  There are no more new blossoms.  They are now putting out runners.  I was picking them off but now I will let them grow so I can expand the number of plants for next year.  They are ever bearers so they won't last for more than 2 or 3 years before their production declines so every year I will let some plants set runners in order to replenish the strawberry patch. 

I took this picture to show all the blossoms on the beans, you will have to click to enlarge it to see the blossoms

I pulled up all the remaining carrots yesterday and am preparing that patch for planting collards, spinach, and kale for fall/winter.  I hope the winter holds off long enough for me to get some greens from them.  I am thinking about using the pvc trellis I made for the squash as a cover for the greens.  By the time the greens need the cover, the squash will no longer need the trellis. 

Here is my Italian fagiolina beans that I think are peas because the blossoms look like sweet peas.  I went to google images and found some plants that look like this and they are called cow peas.  The peas in the pod are very tiny and the pods are half as thin as a pencil.  They are delicious eaten as a young pod or left to mature and eaten as soup beans/peas.  Whatever they are lol.  In the foreground is the squash that I finally was able to save from being destroyed by the birds.  I had to replant them twice.  They may not have time to mature since they got such a late start.  I won't have half the number of squash that I had last year.  Hopefully the sweet potatoes will make up for that.  See the pic of them below.

A bird must have dropped a seed and a corn stalk grew between my sweet potatoes and pole beans.  So I let it grow for visual interest.  I can't wait for the sweet potatoes to be finished.  I want to dig under one plant to see what, if anything is growing.  I bought these as Georgia Jets.  Then I read somewhere online that some companies sell a different variety as Jets and that Jets should get red blossoms and if they don't, they are not true Georgia Jets.  Hmm, that deserves further investigation.

Yesterday I also got 2 pints of roma tomatoes canned.  LOL, yes only 2 pints, but it is a start.  Last year there were hardly any red tomatoes.  This year it looks like the plants will be overrun with nice ripe red tomatoes.  I have a slug problem so I pick the tomatoes a little early and let them ripen in the house.  I am using a product called escar-go by gardens alive.  It works, is organic, but needs to be spread every 2 weeks.  It goes a long way because it is spread very thin.  I think I will put out a few saucers of beer tonight and see if it lives up to what is claims. 

The red tomatoes you see here are beefsteak variety, I forget what it is called.  Maybe beefsteak LOL.  The plant to the right is an unknown.  It was a volunteer from last year so I transplanted it because there was space for it.  It is either a Rutgers or another OP variety that gets huge, I mean huge tomatoes on it.  We will see if/when they grow, this plant got a late start. 

Today's harvest

And now it begins :)  I'm doing a happy dance

If I only had beans :( could have some good veggie soup

Rain

Yesterday and the day before we finally had a significant amount of rain.  The garden looks so much better now.  So do the dang weeds!  LOL

The beans are flowering, and the Italian peas are blooming also, it is easy to miss the pea blooms and I found a few pods on the plants already.  As I said last year, these need to be picked daily because they produce over a nice long period of time, like the pole beans. 

I ate a carrot from the garden last week, yummmm, should have a few more in a week or 2, I tried to get one out of the ground a few days ago and it wouldn't budge, the ground was too hard.  Tomorrow I will try again and see if I can get the biggest ones out. 

The chard is still producing nicely.  There are two plants and I get a nice bunch to eat about every 3-4 days.  I like to wilt it with some vinaigrette, wine, a few drops of liquid smoke, a bit of sugar and a little water.  I planted 4 more a few weeks ago but I don't think they will grow.  There wasn't enough moisture even though I watered the spot every day.  Maybe it was too hot.  Some seeds don't like to grow when it is too hot out.

Hot summer

It certainly has been a hot hot hot summer so far.  Today we have heat warnings in effect.  The temp will be between 105 and 115.  This is almost unheard of here.  And with the humidity we always have, it will be too uncomfortable to be outdoors.  I went out this morning around 6:30 and watered my patio plants, my little lilac and rose bushes and my two remaining raspberry plants. 

The blueberry plants are dead.  All but 2 raspberry plants are dead.  The soil I have here drains almost too well.  There is a lot of sand and the water just percolates through it.  It will be a few years before I have accumulated enough organic matter in the soil to help it hold moisture.

With that said,  I have been watering half the garden one day and the other half the next.  I have been hand watering because 1 of my 4 soaker hoses won't water anymore, there is some sort of blockage in it,  and two of them have sprung leaks that create fountains lol.  In this heat I have been going out after dark when it is cooler to water.  It takes me 30-45 minutes to get it done.

 The garden from the south east corner.  There is the pvc squash trellis I made last year.  This year I planned to have 5 butternut squash plants on it but there are only 2 and one will probably not give me ripe squash before fall sets in.  That's ok though, they are good eating when they are small.  You can eat them like summer squash, skin and all.  Very tasty.  The reason there are only 2 plants is since the weather has been so very dry, the birds visit my garden every time I water to peck worms and bugs out of the ground.  In the process, they also peck my young plants to death.  This is what happened to my carrots and squash.  Both had to be replanted and covered with bird netting to keep birds off.  I feel sorry for the birds.  Food and water are scarce for them this year.  If I had the money for it, I would have a bird bath in the yard.

 This is not a very sharp image.  There are red potatoes here.  Behind them are the Italian peas.  I saved seed from last year and they are doing fantastic in this heat.  They seem to thrive in this hot dry summer.  They have already grown bigger than they did last year.  I can't wait to eat some.  I doubt any will get canned, they will all be eaten fresh and of course some will be allowed to go to seed for next year's crop.  Off to the left of the peas you can see the remains of my borage.  It has flowered, had hundreds of bees on it and now is starting to dye off.  But there are more of them growing so there should be more soon.  In front of the borage is the sage and horehound.

 Ahhh, here we have my one little tomatillo plant in the cage.  It got started a bit late but there are little tomatillos on it already.  To the right of the tomatillo are two rhubarb plants that survived of the 4 I started with.  They are multiplying like gangbusters.  Next spring I will have a nice little bit of them to taste.  Behind the rhubarb is the peas. 

 This is my Mother's day rose :)  Poor thing, it is so hot.  There were 2 pretty little flowers on it last week. 

 There are 7 tomato plants here.  From front to back, one cherry tomato plant that only gets about 4 feet tall but there are loads of delicioius tomatoes.  I pick them almost every day now.  Behind that is a volunteer from last year that I moved.  I don't know which variety it is but I suspect it is the beefsteak type  that I had last year.  Third is another beefsteak type.  In a couple of days I will be eating green fried tomatoes again.  Yummmmy.  Then there are 4 roma plants. I like to eat them fresh as well as can them.  They are so tasty.

 This is a view from the north side of the garden.  It shows the sweet potato hill in front of the pole beans. 

The sweet potatoes, as promised, truly love this hot weather.  Hopefully there will be a nice crop of them to dig before fall hits. They are Georgia Jets.  These are said to mature at 95 days.  That's plenty of time.  I found a website that explains that it isn't so much the number of days that sweet potatoes need to grow, it is the number of heat units during the growing season.  You need a specific number of heat units to be able to get sweet potatoes to grow.  Being a short season variety, these will be just fine as long as our hot hot hot summer continues.  

And oh yes, there is one corn stalk LOL.  Must be a bird or squirrel "dropped" a seed.  I have let it grow just for visual interest.

I had to replant the pole beans.  They are no longer Kentucky wonders.  They are now blue lake.  Eh, that's ok, I have planted them in the past too.  They are also OP so I can save some seed for next year.  A rabbit chewed through my plastic mesh rabbit fence and ate all 3 rows of beans down to little nubbins.  Luckily I was able to find some more seed at the local greenhouse.  And I went to Menards for the WIRE rabbit fence. 

There have been some problems with the bamboo bean poles.  The wind knocks them over even without a load on them.  I am thinking that there will be more trouble with them.  There is one that continues to fall over and the ground is too hard now to push it in farther so I splayed the legs out more, hoping that will help.  Maybe I should do that for all of them.  I am hoping that when there is a load on the top poles, the entire thing will be more steady.  But then again, if it gets windy it might just be a huge sail.    Wait and see.   

 Ahhhh  Strawberries.  I  never grew strawberries before.  Should have.  Yesterday I went out and spread some of my old hay around them so the berries won't get dirty and it will keep the moisture in as well.  There are many nice little berries here.  There are also some plants without berries.  I let them develop runners to make new plants.  Those will be used to expand the strawberry bed next year.  Every year I will let a few of them set runners so I will have new plants every year.  These are ever bearing strawberries so, as I understand, they only last 3-4 years then the berries get smaller so I think it best to let a few new ones grow every year to be able to rotate them and every year I will get nice berries.  Hopefully.  These did well, out of 25 only one died and one was pecked to almost nothing by birds but it has had time to recover. 

There is bird netting around the strawberries.  Those pesky birds are NOT going to get my berries!  If you notice the poles laying on the ground around the strawberry bed, they are holding down the edges of the bird netting.  The netting is attached, at the 4 corners of the bed, to bamboo poles about 18" off the ground, there is about 6-8 inches laying on the ground.  I used zip ties to attach the netting to the poles.  When I want to get in, I simply remove the poles on the ground  on 3 sides, remove 2 of the bamboo poles and walk them to the other side to lay them down.  When I am done, I just put the bamboo poles back in their holes, make sure there are no gaps around the edges and replace the poles on the 3 sides to keep the birds out.  Easy Peasy.

Will it ever get going?

6-7-12
ok enough already with the rabbits who have the munchies.  They ate ALL of my pole beans...all of them :(    Soooo today I went out and bought some chicken wire to keep them out.  Sheesh

6-8-12
Yesterday I went to Menards and bought some chicken wire to put around the garden, then proceeded to put it up, it took some work but it's finished.  I bought 4' fencing so that I could bend about 18" of it at the bottom to help keep rabbits from digging underneath the fence.

Today I replanted the three 10 foot rows of pole beans.  The first time around I had kentucky wonder beans,which I had last year, both green and yellow.  This time I have blue lake, which is what the local greenhouse had on hand.  This might be a good thing, this way I can decide which I like better.
Both varieties are OP so I can save the seed of either.

I had to replant squash.  It's getting almost too late to be doing that.  Squash needs a long season.  The birds keep pecking it out of the ground in search of worms in the wet dirt.  I water with a soaker hose so the wet dirt is always where the seeds and plants are.  Note; put up some bird netting to keep them out of the squash seeds :)  Hmmm maybe it is the rabbits, the squash is not inside the fence.

Today I also thinned out the peas I planted too thickly.  They would have been very overcrowded.

A couple of days ago I picked my first two cherry tomatoes.  Yesterday I ate one and today I ate the other one :)  Today I also picked 4 more of them but they won't be ready to eat for a few days yet.  Soon there will be handsful every few days for the rest of the summer, happy happy :)

The roma tomatoes are doing quite well, they are growing nicely and there are flowers all over them.

I can't get carrots to grow.  There are only 20 of them out there now, there should be hundreds.  But I will take what I can get, I love love carrots.

The rhubarb is doing nicely even if only 2 of the original 4 lived.  To be fair, one was DOA when I opened the package to plant them.  They will fill in the area where I planted in a couple of years.

The strawberry plants seem to have stalled, maybe I should fertilize them a little.  I'll google it to find out what to do.  Ok, I googled it....too late this year to fertilize them.  It needs to be done before new growth in the spring.

Only one sweet potato plant has been lost so far, out of 10 that is ok with me as long as no more of them die.  That doesn't seem likely.  The rest of them look very healthy and are showing good growth.

I have been getting enough spinach and chard for a nice addition to my meals every few days, and only from one spinach plant and 2 chard plants.   I planted some more spinach a few days ago but I will have to go without it for a few weeks.  The plant I am picking now is giving smaller and smaller leaves.  Pretty soon it will be flowering.