Good gardening blogs, spring transplants and potato planting

Sweet Potatoes growing slips in our germination chamber.
Photo Kathryn Simmons

My blogpost on the Mother Earth News Organic Gardening Blog is up. It’s Grow Your Own Sweet Potato Slips, and you can click the link to read it there.

There are many advantages of home-grown sweet potato slips over purchased ones: you can produce as many slips as you want, when you want them, and have spares in case of casualties. The post describes our straight-forward system for growing sturdy slips.

Our sweet potatoes are in our germinating chamber, this old glass-door fridge which no longer works. The heat and light are provided by an incandescent light bulb. Soon we will start cutting slips each day.


This Sustainable Market Farming blog is on the Top 75 Vegetable Gardening blogs, consequently I get to display their medallion on my website. Check out the list (actually 78 this week – data are refreshed every week). There are some other very good ones, including some I have mentioned before such as my Virginia neighbors  Southern Exposure Seed Exchange,  and Margaret Roach’s A Way to Garden which covers vegetables and flowers and landscaping. There are also a couple more I really like: Steve Albert’s Harvest to Table  from California (always good solid information), and Joe Lamp’l’s Joe Gardener. You may know him from the 26-episode TV series, Fresh From the Garden or the 200 episodes of Growing a Greener World®, or one of his books. So, if the weather is awful and your plants are struggling, seek solace and inspiration in a good blog. It won’t take long to read one post and you’ll feel fortified afterwards!

On A Way to Garden, Margaret Loach has her “When to Start Seed: My Garden Planting Calculator” Simply enter your average last spring frost date and right there in front of your eyes will appear the indoor sowing dates and outdoor transplant or sowing dates for 32 vegetables, several herbs and a list of flowers.

Another blog I like which hasn’t made it onto the top 75 yet is Garden Betty. Her wide-ranging posts include The No-Brainer Guide to Starting Seeds Indoors, instructions for caring for house plants in late winter and information on drip irrigation systems.


March hoophouse bed prepared for tomato transplants – holes dug, compost added.
Photo Wren Vile

Meanwhile, here on the farm, I’m pondering whether to start planting the hoophouse tomatoes today. Our “usual” date for planting them in March 15, but cold weather has delayed the growth of the transplants and also the warming of the soil in the hoophouse. We’re almost two weeks later than usual, but the plants are still not huge. On the other hand we are now getting a break in the cold weather, which would help them get  established before the cold weather forecast from April 6 onwards.

This is what I’m looking forward to:

Young tomato transplants in the hoophouse. Photo Kathryn Simmons

Outdoors we finished transplanting spinach, worked on transplanting a couple of beds of kale, and transplanted collards and early cabbage. Today is potato planting day. Yesterday the crew cut the chitted (pre-sprouted) seed potatoes into planting pieces.

Cutting pre-sprouted seed potato pieces.
Photo Kati Falger

 

Twin Oaks January Calendar – Starting a new garden season

A flat of newly emerged lettuce seedlingsPhoto Kathryn Simmons
A flat of newly emerged lettuce seedlings
Photo Kathryn Simmons

Yes, really! On January 17, I sowed flats of cabbage, lettuce and mini-onions (cipollini), and the cabbage and lettuce are already up. Onions usually take 10 days, so I’m not surprised not to see them yet. It’s fun to see new seedlings, even though my energy isn’t ready for taking on another growing season yet. I’m still enjoying hibernation!

The cabbage varieties are Early Jersey Wakefield, a quick-growing small pointy-head open-pollinated variety, and Faroa, a quick-growing fairly small round hybrid that has been very reliable for us. These are for a bed of early cabbage, to eat after our stored winter cabbage is all gone. We’ll sow our main-crop cabbage on 2/7, in much bigger quantities.

I sowed two lettuces: reliable old Salad Bowl and the unusual Cracoviensis, a pink veined sturdy leaf lettuce, that we have found is only useful for us at this first sowing. It bolts too easily once it gets even faintly warm. It tends not to get bitter even when bolting, but our diners aren’t going to believe that!

We’re also still busy with various stages of our garden planning. yesterday I updated our harvest calendar, which tells our cooks which crops they can expect when, and also our food processing calendar to tell the food processing crew when to be ready to tackle large amounts of broccoli, beans or paste tomatoes, for example. I’m part way through revising the document we call our garden calendar, which is really a month-by-month task list. If you were following this blog in the fall, you’ll remember some of those monthly garden task lists. We’ve planned which crops are going in which of the 60 permanent raised beds and identified the ones we need to spread compost on and till first. And then we twiddle our thumbs – lots of rain last week (and a bit of snow) mean it will be a couple more weeks before the soil is dry enough to till.

Here’s our short Twin Oaks Garden Task List for January:

Planning: Prune the catalogs, do the filing, consolidate notes on varieties and quantities.

Week 1: Finalize seed orders, if not done in December. Revise Seedling Schedule using seed order.

Week 2

    : Revise Outdoor Planting Schedule. Plan labor needs for the year.

Week 3

    : Revise Raised Bed Planning Chart. Plan raised beds for Feb-June.

Week 4:           Revise Garden Calendar, Lettuce List and lettuce Log.

Order Bt, spinosad and predatory beasties, coir. [sweet potato slips for shipping 5/12-5/17 if not growing our own]
Repair greenhouse and coldframes and tidy. Check germinator-fridge and heat mat. Repair flats, and make new if needed. Make stakes. Clean labels. 

Check equipment: rototiller, discs, and mower – repair or replace as needed.  Repair and sharpen tools.

Freeze out greenhouse to kill pests, or spray with soap or cinnamon oil every five days.  Import ladybugs.
Check potatoes, sweet potatoes and squash in storage.

Mid-Jan: In greenhouse sow lettuce #1, early cabbage, mini-onions, early broccoli, onions.

Late Jan: In greenhouse sow lettuce #2, scallions #1, spinach, tomatoes, peppers for hoophouse
Plant small potato onions, 4-5″ apart, ½-1” deep, in a mild spell. Remove mulch to plant, then replace it. Plant shallots & mulch.

Perennials (see November list). Weed blueberries, raspberries, asparagus (spread compost), grapes, rhubarb, strawberries.  Add soil amendments, fertilize (not strawberries) and mulch. Prune blueberries, (take cuttings if wanted). Fall raspberries: cut all canes to the ground, remove canes from aisles. Summer raspberries: remove old fruiting canes & canes from aisles.

Harvest: (Chard?), collards, kale, (senposai?) spinach, leeks, (Yukina Savoy?).

Our freshly mulched asparagus patch.Photo Kathryn Simmons
Our freshly mulched asparagus patch.
Photo Kathryn Simmons

Sweet potato harvest – all in!

Our sweet potato harvest well underway.
Photo credit Wren Vile

           

Usually sweet potatoes are harvested the week the first frost typically occurs. In anticipation of frosts (that didn’t happen) on Sunday and Monday nights, we harvested this week. Contrary to myth, there is no toxin that moves from frozen leaves down into the roots. On the other hand, cold injury can ruin the crop, and roots without leaf cover are exposed to cold air temperatures, and have lost their method of pulling water up out of the soil. Cold wet soil can quickly rot sweet potatoes (I know, it’s happened here).

To harvest, we first remove the vines from the area to be harvested that day. There is usually 3 afternoons’ digging for ours, and we want to leave live vines to protect the rest of the crop overnight. We use pruners to snip the vines where they emerge from the soil, leaving stumps to show where to dig. We roll the vines into the spaces between the rows.           Using digging forks, we carefully dig up the roots, which grow in the ground in a bunch-of-bananas shape. We want to select good potatoes for seed, and we grow several different kinds (Georgia Jet, Beauregard, and a couple of heritage varieties whose names we don’t know), so we make sure not to mix potatoes from different rows. As we dig, we set the potatoes out beside the spot where they’ve grown, one clump per plant, so it’s easy to identify the most productive plants.

It’s important not to bruise the roots, or to leave them exposed to temperatures higher than 90°F (32°C) for more than half an hour, or they will get sun-scald. Below 55°F (13°C), they’ll get chilling injury. We also avoid any abrasion of the skin, which is very fragile at this stage. We leave the sweet potatoes to dry on the ground for 1-2 hours, unless the weather is unsuitable. This year we had ideal weather, not too hot, not too cold; breezy enough to dry the skins, sunny.

We want to grow our own slips (baby plants) next year, so we save at least 1 root per 5 slips wanted.  (1 good slip every 16″.) So to plant 800 row feet, (600 slips), we save 100 each of our two main varieties and 20 each of the two heirlooms. That should be plenty. Some will shrivel or rot, so we allow a margin. We don’t save for seed any roots that look diseased. We choose plants with a high yield and no string (rat-tail) roots. From these plants, we choose small-medium sized potatoes with typical shape and color.

When grading and crating the roots in the field, we first choose the seed potatoes, and then sort storable from “Use First” roots. Large open broken surfaces will cure and can be stored, but any roots with soft wet damaged areas or deep holes (whether from voles, bugs or fork tines) will not store, and should be graded out, for composting or immediate use. We sort into 4″ deep wood flats or 5″ plastic crates for curing, and buckets for the “Use First” category.

Immediately after harvest, we took the boxes of sweet potatoes into a warm damp basement below the dining hall, to cure. This allows the skin to thicken, cuts to heal over and some of the starches to convert to sugars. Uncured “green” sweet potatoes are not very sweet at all, and are better used in dishes where they combine with other foods. A baked uncured sweet potato is a sad disappointment.

We stack our boxes of roots on pallets, and put wooden spacer sticks between boxes in each stack, to ensure air flow. We get quite good temperatures, but keeping humidity up is difficult for us. We cover the flats with newspaper to hold in some moisture. The best result seems to come from splashing water on the concrete floor several times each day. We use box fans to improve the airflow, and the basement already has some natural ventilation.

Ideal conditions for curing are 85-90°F (29-32°C), and 80-95% humidity for 4-7 days, with some airflow and ventilation. Curing takes longer if conditions are less then perfect. The length of the curing period also varies with the dryness of the soil just prior to harvest. We usually reckon on 10-14 days. During that time, we’ll be taking turns to stoke the stove in the basement to keep the temperature up.

So – how did we do this year? Middle of the road, I’d say. Decent yields, but not a bumper crop – we still had empty boxes left over. The deer were regularly eating our vines until quite recently. Last year we had a dog to chase the deer off, but he met with a road accident. His replacement was old, and she just wanted to be a pet, so we had deer again. We used drip irrigation and biodegradable plastic mulch this year, and did a good job of weeding, so I put the lower yields down to deer damage.

Last year’s (weedier!) sweet potato field.
Photo credit Kathryn Simmons

Now the harvest is complete, we will disk the area and sow cover crops. It’s too late in the year for oats. We can sow wheat, winter rye and Austrian winter peas up till 10/31. We prefer winter wheat after the sweet potatoes,  because we’ll use that area next year for spring white potatoes in mid-March, and rye takes too long to break down early in the spring.