Just 80 Pounds of Potatoes to Go

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By Julianne Idleman July 20, 2011

There was certainly no danger of me winning the 99 Pound Potato Challenge with this year’s ‘Rose Gold’ crop even though it is a new Personal Best for us here in the Dirt to Dinner garden. In 2010, we harvested 20 lbs of potatoes from a fifteen square foot raised bed and this year we managed the same weight of harvest in only nine square feet. That’s almost an extra pound of potatoes harvested per square foot in 2011. And this patch of potatoes also produced flowers and potato berries that were harvested so that we can experiment with growing from seed.

The ‘Rose Gold’ potatoes were planted March 29th and harvested July 19th, 112 days later. They were planted in new ground that started out as a compost pile and was covered in a layer of rice straw and top soil. Potatoes were hilled to just over 24″ with alternating layers of straw and potting mix. They could have been hilled much deeper. Vines were over four feet tall and some stolons grew at least two feet long. With their excellent taste and this respectable harvest, ‘Rose Gold’ potatoes will probably gain a spot in our deep hilling trials this fall or next spring.

Unfortunately, I was not the first one to harvest the ‘Rose Gold’ patch. Just the other day the dog was chasing something and digging along the edge of the patch. I shooed her away and went back to watering the tomatillos. But today in that corner, I found at least six potatoes that were very strangely shaped and clearly no longer at their full weight when it came time for the count. Do squirrels eat raw potatoes? Who eats raw potatoes, can climb the fence into the yard and is faster than a streaking Labradoodle? Those potatoes started fist-sized, if you have small hands like me, and a good chunk of them has definitely been chewed off!

The ‘Rose Gold’ potato vines were brown and fallen over and mostly dried up so I knew they were ready to harvest. I might have liked to allow the potatoes a few weeks undisturbed in the soil to harden their skins for storage but I pulled the patch before any more unauthorized feasting took place. I have two more patches and several potatoes in bags growing in that area. The patch shown here was planted April 6th and contains a broad mix of varieties for the Great Potato Grow Out Project. The bulk of the varieties still have lots of mostly upright, green vines. They wilt in hot weather but with water and evening cool they stand most of the way back up again. Except for the plant in the bottom right corner.

Potato varieties grow for a unique number of days before they finish setting tubers and the vines die back. Some early varieties are ready in as few as 75 days. The ‘Red Thumb’ potatoes have been the first in this trial to be ready for harvest at about 90 days. This vine is a ‘Caribe’ potato that is done growing and I plan to pull these potatoes very soon before anyone else starts to harvest them for me!

Five New Beans

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By Julianne Idleman May 29, 2011

My mother-in-law can’t seem to stop herself from growing enough green beans for a small army, so I do the drying beans at my house. Mostly ‘Cherokee Trail of Tears’ black beans, California Black-Eyed peas and a few colorful soup beans like ‘Jacob’s Gold’ and ‘Speckled Cranberry’. This year I’m also experimenting with some types of beans I’ve never grown before; ‘Scarlet Emperor’ beans, Four-Angled beans, also called Winged beans, Yard-Long beans which are also known as Snake beans or bora, both white and yellow Lima beans and tan Garbanzo beans.

We’re using a number of different kinds of vertical supports for the beans, many of them homemade with bamboo. In Vertical Gardening Derek Fell reports that he’s able to harvest ten times more pods from his pole beans than their bush counterparts. Still, I couldn’t resist planting a bed of bush ‘Cannellini’ beans. We love ‘Cannellini’ beans but there just wasn’t a pole variety of them I wanted to try. I can substitute ‘White Emergo’ beans instead of the smaller ‘Cannellini’ in recipes, and they grow on big sturdy vines, so they will have to do for the pole variety this year.

The ‘Scarlet Emperor’ Runner beans have an 8′ arbor to climb, which I hear they will need. They were the first beans to germinate in the Dirt to Dinner garden this year. I planted a few of them on March 9th just to see how the ground temperature was doing and up they came! I guess there’s a reason they are so popular in England. I was attracted to the idea of growing a perennial bean plant but I’m also looking forward to their reportedly “showy” flowers, though we haven’t seen any yet. These gorgeous blossoms are from an ‘Akahana Mame’ growing on a teepee with ‘Louisiana Purple Pod’ and ‘French Climbing’ beans for effect.

The Winged beans and the Yard-Long beans are planted on either side of an 8′ trellis with sesame plants growing through the center. Imagine an A-frame with garden netting hanging down on either side. One side of the netting gets ‘Four-Angle’ beans planted along half of it. The other side of the netting gets ‘Red Noodle’ planted on the opposite half. That way the sesame growing in between gets sun from both sides where the beans aren’t. The last beans to go in are the Limas. They like warm soil, which is in short supply again this year. It takes several days for them to emerge from the soil and spread their wing-like seed leaves. I’m nervous a bird or bug or varmint will devour them before photosynthesis even begins but keep your fingers crossed for me. We’re trying ‘King of the Garden’ lima seed from both Baker Creek and Bountiful Gardens and ‘Golden’ Lima beans from Seed Savers Exchange. If you’re experimenting with new bean varieties in your garden this year, let us know what’s working well for you and how you’re growing them.

The 226 Day Beet

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By Julianne Idleman May 26, 2011

This is my first post for Fight Back Friday.

I love yellow beets. They hate me, but I adore them. I crave them no matter how stubbornly they refuse to germinate for me, or how long it takes the few that deign to grow in my garden to finally develop to eating size. I could grow red beets in the dirt that accumulates in the trunk of my car. Yellows are carefully seeded into flats and coddled atop the hot tub as I pray for germination. Then, carefully, with a special $7 tool purchased for no other purpose, I transplant the tiny four-leaved beets into the prepared garden bed at the tender age of three weeks. By the next morning, half of them fall over dead just to spite me. Or perhaps slugs crave yellow beets even worse than I do.

But today, after 226 long, anxious days, I lunched on yellow beets braised with their greens in homemade chicken bone broth. I dribbled tamari on a third of my bowl, some really snooty French apple cider vinegar on a third and left the center portion au naturel. The bliss! After lunch I seeded a new flat with ‘Touchstone Gold Beet’ from High Mowing and ‘Golden Detroit Beet’ from Natural Gardening Company.

Another root vegetable I struggle with is carrots. They are happy to sprout in my garden but the second I look away something, or someone, mows their tiny tops down to nubs and whatever is left of the seedling dries up and blows away. I got three patches of carrots to grow this fall and they have overwintered well. We’re still eating them in May, which is wonderful. But I would love to grow more. I have tried covering the seed bed with straw, I’ve tried covering it with burlap, I’ve tried interplanting with cabbages–which actually worked in one of the patches but not the other two.

Maybe it’s time to pre-sprout the seeds on paper towels and then transplant into a bed? I got some red carrots that look gorgeous in the catalog, but half the seeds are already gone with nothing but an empty garden patch nicely lined with onions to show for it. I know carrots are supposed to like tomatoes, but do they hate onions?

If you have a favorite way of growing carrots, please share it with me in the comments. I need suggestions!

Two Greens, an Orange and a Blonde: It’s Tomato Time

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By Julianne Idleman May 21, 2011

The first tomatoes into the ground this year were the ‘Principe Borghese’ drying tomatoes, four of them started from Bountiful Gardens seed, four from Victory seed. Six of the plants are doing very well, flowering and just beginning to set fruit. Two, one from each seed company but both planted in the same section of the bed, are smaller and less robust. They don’t appear diseased or I would pull them out rather than risk the other plants. If you have a guess as to why they are so much slower than their buddies, I’d love to hear it!

Our second tomato trial is four different sources of ‘Cherokee Purple’ seed; High Mowing, J.L. Hudson, D. Landreth and Seeds of Change. This crew was seeded in mid-March and the best plant from each source was planted in the garden May 1st, with compost, egg shells, bone meal and salmon heads. The tomatoes are approximately 3′ apart with some heirloom basil planted nearby. A second batch of strong, healthy seedlings, one from each source, are planted in a friend’s garden a few miles away. So far three of the four plants in the Dirt to Dinner garden are relatively uniform. The Landreth seedling has the largest diameter and the ‘Seeds of Change’ plant is slower growing than the other three, but they all look strong and healthy. The High Mowing ‘Cherokee Purple’ is my bet for the first to flower. Planted close to this trial is a ‘Cherokee Chocolate’ from Sustainable Seed as another point of comparison. It has already opened it’s first flowers, and they are huge!

The next tomato trial is a side-by-side comparison of ‘Orange Heirloom’ against ‘Persimmon’. Both are new varieties to us and the garden. We’re looking forward to trying them and hope to choose one to trial more fully next year. We are also comparing ‘Black Sea Man’ to ‘Black Krim’ and ‘Rosso Sicilian’ to ‘Costaluto Genovese’, which did very well for us in 2009. The ‘Costaluto Genovese’ makes deeply lobed fruit with an acidic, somewhat tart, robust tomato flavor. They were my top choice for slicing tomatoes until I met the ‘Cherokee Purple’.

We are also growing out five seedlings from Tom Wagner’s ‘Search for the Blue Zebra’ which we will compare with his ‘Green Zebra’ and ‘Black Zebra’ grown from Boondockers seed. These seedlings, just planted yesterday, are covered with 30% shade cloth for the first few days as they acclimate to the new garden bed. I have no idea what the Blue Zebra’s will be like. They may not be blue and they may not have stripes, but it’ll still be fun to see what we will get.

The other tomatoes in the garden are one each of ‘Pineapple’, ‘Aunt Ruby’s German Green’, ‘Old Kentucky’, ‘Pruden’s Purple’, ‘German Pink’ and, my eating-out-of-the-garden favorite, ‘Blondkofchen’ which does not seem any too happy about the cool weather we are having this spring.

That feels like a lot of tomatoes all of a sudden, but it’s really only two dozen plants, or so. OK, thirty, in this first batch. We’ll talk about the sauce tomatoes another day. It’ll be weeks before we have to find room for all of those seedlings.

How Much Do Seeds Really Matter?

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By Julianne Idleman May 8, 2011

When I grab a ‘Cherokee Purple’ tomato seedling from the nursery, I look to see if it’s been grown organically but I have no idea where the seed used to grow that seedling came from. And I never gave it a thought—until this year. This year, seeds and where they come from has felt a lot more urgent. And I’ve tried to make sure that all the Dirt to Dinner seeds came from companies not involved with GMOs, the more local and more independent the better. In order to support the Safe Seed growers I have found, I bought seed of my favorite varieties from more than one source. I have ‘Cherokee Purple’ seeds from four different companies growing. I think I ended up with ‘Lemon’ cucumbers from at least five different places.

Which got me thinking, “How much does it really matter where my seeds come from?” Of course it matters in terms of voting with your seed dollars for the kind of practices you want to see in the seed industry, supporting local economies where possible and to the folks who grow and distribute safe seed. But does it matter in my garden? Does it matter on my table?

Turns out, I think it matters a whole lot more than I ever imagined. In late February, I started seeds of ‘Principe Borghese’ tomatoes for drying from Bountiful Gardens and Victory Seeds. I planted them under the same conditions in the same flat. All the BG seed was sprouted a week later, with less than half the VS seeds up. Final germination was BG 100% and VS 75%. I eventually thinned to the best four plants from each seed house and on April 16^th I planted them in the same warm and cozy growing bed. The tallest, strongest, plant, which is already flowering, is one of the Victory seeds. And the only seedling that didn’t do well in the transplant process? It’s also from Victory. Though maybe I should have more thoroughly thawed the salmon heads before I stuffed them in the bottom of the tomato holes. If that poor seedlings roots were scrunched up against frozen salmon eyeballs the first day or two, that’s hardly the seed’s fault! I plan to measure the amount and weight of tomatoes produced and to dry each batch separately in case there is a difference in taste. If it doesn’t eventually taste good, who cares which day it germinates?

The day after I started the tomatoes, I planted ‘Scarlet Ohno’ turnips from High Mowing and Bountiful Gardens. The BG tops are taller and earlier, which, if you are growing for turnip greens, could make a big difference. But the roots are different as well. The Bountiful Gardens ‘Scarlet Ohno’ is a vibrant, almost-beet red. The High Mowing root, though the same size, is clearly more pink even though the two turnip rows are growing in the same bed, with the same soil, water, everything.

I’ve been surprised by the amount of variation in some of the varieties. I tried ‘Canellini’ beans from three different sources and one variety didn’t even come up at all!

I don’t actually understand enough about the seed industry or plant genetics to fully get why this would be. I’m heading back to Carol Deppe’s Breeding Your Own Vegetable Varieties to see what I can figure out. And I’m going to keep experimenting with side-by-side trials like these to see what else I can learn with the kids in the garden this summer.

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