If you’ve ever been around a place that’s recently been flooded, I think you know what I mean. Yuck. It smells like “The Swamp Thing” is just around the corner.
Fortunately, many things seem to have survived the flooding. Including, of course, the crabgrass and thistles. The onions seem particularly perky after getting all of that rain in a week. I guess I can be a bit more generous with their irrigation once the field dries out again. The sweet potatoes were planted in a long mound (think giant molehill) and they barely got wet feet. They are loving the heat & I expect great things from them. The regular potatoes look good also. The started-from-true-seed potatoes were probably killed by the flooding, as they were still quite small, but I haven’t been able to see for sure.
Today might be the day where it actually gets dry enough for me to walk out in the field again. I tried yesterday, but had to turn around before I started losing shoes in the mud.
We’ll have most of the same things at the market this weekend that we had last weekend.
Our cherries are getting ripe. I’ve never had a cherry tree before and it’s very pretty. Another bonus item on the property is black rasperries. With the amount of rain we’ve had, there should be a great crop. The same fencerows that are full of raspberries are also full of poison ivy, so we’ll just have to be careful at harvest time. The black raspberries are just starting to form- I think they still have another 3-4 weeks before ripening.
I’m really glad our garlic was planted in a different county. We are going to have to find the highest spot on the property to plant in it the fall!
It’s almost spring, but the weather is taking its time warming up. I’ve been spending a lot of time in Farmer’s Purgatory, washing out seed containers to reuse them, mixing up seed starting media, and fussing with my seedlings. Using rainwater to water them is a new thing this year for me also. So far I have no complaints, other than that I like to let it warm up to room temperature before using it. Just have to remember to dump the barrels over before mosquito season!
This week I planted some tomatoes, eggplant, lavender, and potato seeds. I’ve never grown potatoes from “true seed” (i.e. NOT little chunks-o-potato) before. I ordered 100 seeds, and they sent me something approximating 500. I called the seed company last night to see what the germination rate was, thinking maybe they sent so many because germination is low. No, they said, it’s 80%. So I have about 300-350 seeds in the trays right now. Good thing we have a lot of space out in the field, because I also have a pile of normal seed potatoes coming later.
The broccoli and some of the onions are taking their first trip outdoors today in their trays. Hopefully I remember to bring them in before they get too stressed out.
There are so many tomatoes right now that we aren’t keeping ahead of them, canning only on the weekends.
Dug the first hill of Yukon Gold potatoes this week. They look nice, but there just are not a whole ton of them with the weather we’ve had. Potatoes like a lot of rain when they’re trying to potato, and it has not rained much here this summer. There is another partial hill of them to dig, so I won’t post the yield until they are all out of the ground.
I’m looking forward to digging the “All Blue” potatoes a little later, when the vines have died down. The description in the catalog said they were very abundant yielders, so we’ll see what that means when it hardly rains at all.
