The Great Potato Harvest
Earlier this week, the great potato harvest began. If you remember, I planted about 200lbs of seed potatoes. The ‘Red Gold’ and ‘Dark Red Norland’ potatoes were ready to be dug up. Neither of these will keep for a long time, so we’ll be eating them like mad. Any extras that we don’t eat will be fed to the ducks, chickens and pigs.
The rest of the potatoes are still growing. They are starting to die back, but they won’t be ready for harvest for at least another month or so. That’s the nice thing about growing a 70 day potato, you can harvest them early and be eating potatoes long before your main crop is ready.
I planted a huge portion of the main garden in potatoes. Why? Because they’re fairly easy. Potatoes grow so quickly, they smother the weeds quite well. They also produce very well, calorie for calorie, better than any other garden crop. I planted them in early June, mulched them in early July and that was it.
These ‘Dark Red Norland’ potatoes are quite lovely to look at. The color is quite amazing when you first spot them in the soil, they’re bright fuschia. I’ve grown them before, but I’m always surprised by how bright they are at harvest. Some red potatoes can be difficult to spot when you’re harvesting, not so with these beauties, that bright pink is easy to see.
The ‘Red Gold’ potatoes were planted rather close, this makes them produce a greater number of small potatoes rather than a few large ones. When I have boiling potatoes like this, I prefer them to be on the small side so they cook up quickly. Overall, the potato harvest is going quite well this year. We’ve been enjoying eating potatoes once again.
Do you grow early, mid and late season potatoes?
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Quote of the Day: Robyn Griggs Lawrence
“I know we’d be nuts to patently give up the machines that permeate our homes and make our lives so much easier. But what if, everyone in a while – especially when the world around us seems crazy and uncontrollable – we submerge our hands into warm, soapy water and hand a towel to our significant other. Or we take ten minutes to sweep the floor, focusing all our attention on that simple task with its ancient symbolic reference to sweeping away the bad spirits and the stale energy that may be lurking in the corners. What if?”
Robyn Griggs Lawrence (The Wabi-Sabi House: The Japanese Art of Imperfect Beauty)
My dishwasher died many years ago and I’ve been washing dishes by hand ever since. It forces me to slow down and enjoy the moment, to think about what I see outside my window, to appreciate the things I have, to cultivate simplicity. Sometimes doing our chores the old fashioned way helps us cultivate mindfulness and it can help us appreciate what we have.
What is one chore you like to do by hand?
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More Pets – Kind of
This past Wednesday I received 5,000 meal worms from Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm.
They’re alive of course, and I put them in a container on the back porch filled with wheat mids. I’ll be using them as my starter colony to grow meal worms for my chickens and ducks during the cold winter months.
After doing some research, chickens are supposed to lay better in the winter if they have a more natural source of protein. I’ve read in various places that people have great success giving their chickens live meal worms and red wrigglers from a worm bin in the cold winter months when they can’t scratch for their own live food. Even if they don’t lay more eggs my chickens will sure enjoy them as snacks and they’ll make the eggs they do lay much healthier! This is all part of my effort to close the loop of what comes into my garden, should be an interesting experiment.
Do you grow any feed for your animals?
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Friday Favorite: Family Visits
For the past week, my parents have been visiting. We’ve seen a few sights, hiked, visited the ocean, chatted, walked around the garden, drank some coffee and of course we’ve eaten a respectable amount of ice cream.
My parents seemed particularly fond of the menagerie here at Chiot’s Run. They loves giving the pigs snacks and my mom kept a keen eye on the ducklings, herding them back to their pool when they wandered off into the woods.
It’s always nice to visit with family, especially now that we are separated by many miles. Usually we’re the ones that end up traveling back to Ohio where they all live, but it sure is nice to share our neck of the woods with those closest to us.
Does your family live nearby or far away?
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A Bust
On Tuesday, we tried to visit a few gardens in the capital city of Augusta with my parents. The list that inspired us, was found in Down East Magazine, clearly it must have been an older article (the date didn’t appear on the web article).
Our first stop, was Viles Arboretum. Which was actually nice, small, but nice. My dad was particularly interested in seeing the American Chestnut Collection.
The hosta garden was very impressive. I didn’t count but there were hundreds of different varieties. The setting was perfect, all along a shady walkway lined with birch trees, it was really beautiful. If you want to add hostas to the garden, this is the place to check them out.
Our next stop was the garden at the Blaine House, the governor’s mansion. It was supposed to be open for self-guided tours on Tues-Thurs. I tried calling ahead, but couldn’t reach them. When we arrived, the gardens were less then impressive from outside the fence (my gardens in Malvern were much nicer). The gardener on duty told us we’d have to get a reservation at a museum down the street, but he wasn’t exactly sure where it was or if they gave out reservations, he really didn’t know much. I guess people aren’t clamoring to tour these gardens and their website was way out of date.
We then stopped at the Blaine Memorial Park, which was described as follows: Adjacent to the historic Forest Grove Cemetery, the site affords sweeping views that overlook the city and Kennebec River for several miles.
Clearly the article was written a LONG time ago, or the author of the article just copied things from the website and didn’t actually visit the site. This was the “sweeping view of the Kennebec”. It’s behind all those tall trees.
Our last garden to see in Augusta was the Kennebec Valley Garden Club Park. It was described in the article as: Two acres of perennials, birdhouses, trees, and a children’s butterfly and hummingbird garden. This is what we found, a small fenced in garden filled with weeds.
I guess Augusta isn’t the gardening community it used to be. We laughed and drowned our sorrows in ice cream from the Augusta farmers market.
Since we hadn’t seen much of anything that day, we decided to swing by the Johnny’s Selected Seeds Research Farm to see something that resembled a garden, we were not disappointed.
Sometimes things don’t go as planned, in fact, around here it’s rare that something actually goes as planned. This kind of day is actually quite typical for us. The whole point of the day was to spend time with family and that was accomplished. No doubt we’ll laugh about our Augusta Maine Garden Tour Bust for years to come.
Have you ever gone somewhere to see something that was no longer there?
