As we get deeper into the summer some veggies and other stuff are ready for harvest. We've already harvested a number of blueberries and blackberries, which we've liberally used on salads. I've removed some leaves of different herbs that we used in stews a couple of times, along with some green beans I also harvested. Now while I'm still pulling green beans and herbs and some blueberries, I was waiting for the potatoes and even the pears which seem to be staged and waiting for maturity on their respective trees. Unfortunately we didn't get any apples other than some scraggly specimens and peaches were a no show. Strawberries were mediocre but we still got some.
For anyone who knows about growing potatoes, they'd tell you that you start off by planting the eyes from a seed potato, along with a portion of the spud as well. These eyes eventually grow into huge plants that mimic some tomato plants. In the meantime underground, the root system develops into a network of potatoes, all growing on the ends of some of the roots in the system. Eventually the plant dies back, leaving behind the tubers, as the potatoes are called, still sitting underground in the now defunct root system. Well now the time has finally come that the plants have died back. I started digging into the dirt of one of the raised beds used for potatoes, an old refrigerator. This large bed had three plants in it, along with a tomato plant (I couldn't find anywhere else to plant the thing). I started digging up spuds from one plant and as I kept digging I kept pulling up more and more spuds of various sizes, from large grape sized to about 5 inches long. After I was satisfied with the clearing of the fridge bed, I had a fair amount of spuds amassed. I still had three other beds to clear, one was a half drum, another one was half of a shop fan shell, and the other a washer drum. In the half drum bed, there were two potato plants, with one that was still alive and well so that one had to be left alone and my digging had to be careful so as to not damage the roots of this plant. I carefully dug around where the dead plant was an pulled up some more spuds, but not many. The half of the fan shell with the spuds netted another good batch of spuds along with the washer drum. With that, I cleared all of the planting spots of spuds, and while I was at it I pulled up some old lettuce and other salad plants that got too old for use. With these newly cleared beds, I could plant some new stuff now.... Now when I initially planted the spuds early in the year, I didn't use up all of the eyes on the seed potatoes that I had in the bag I got from TSC. I still had three whole potatoes that had multiple eyes on each spud. So with the beds all cleared of plants I replanted these areas with new potato eyes so I can hopefully have another harvest of spuds at the end of the growing season later in the fall. With the harvest of spuds, we now have to come up with some ways to use these things without overdosing on the starch in our diets. We'll probably end up using these things in a series of stews or soups. Of course some of the spuds can be allowed to mature to where they start spawning eyes of their own which I can use for another generation of spuds in the following spring. Of course when the next batch of spuds do grow these will most likely be the ones I'd use for the next spring's plantings. In the meantime we'd have to try and use up this batch so they don't go bad. The overall harvest hasn't been the best but it hasn't been the worst. The crazy thing is with all of the other things going on, some of the things I wanted to do in the garden I didn't get to yet and of course that caused me to have to do some last minute things to get some plants in the dirt which of course is reflected in the lowered production. The cooler and super rainy weather in the spring months all the way to almost summer caused the spud plants to grow like mad but oddly enough, other plants didn't grow like I thought they should, and now that the weather has gotten oppressive, a lot of plants are just kind of going inside and chilling in the AC for the summer. Hopefully they'll get off their asses and really go into some growth spurts and put out something worthwhile for the year to make this planting season even more worthwhile.
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