Fruits of My Labor

I'm not a gardener who likes to spend hours in the yard every day. Maybe that will be me one day, but for now I try to plan for the level of work I know I am willing to put in. Summers in Georgia are HOT. So I have a system. I work hard in April when the weather is perfect. I spend hours preparing the soil for my vegetable beds, pulling weeds, fertilizing, and planting. In May, I pull weeds, watering plants, and maybe some planting or fertilizing I didn't get to in April. In June, I keep watering things, pull the occasional weed, and expect to spend most of my time harvesting. Because when July hits, my plants will be lucky if I water them. It's just too hot.

My harvest last weekend: mint, blueberries, strawberries, cherry tomatoes, and beans

It's been a pretty good year so far, in spite of the critters. Voles killed a third of my bean plants by eating the roots. Deer ate all the leaves off the remaining bean plants last month. But the bean plants bounced back somewhat and still gave me a few beans. It's really only enough for one person for one dinner, but hey, at least they look pretty. (I grew purple beans and yellow beans this year.)

My harvest this weekend: beans, cherry tomatoes, blueberries, and a Shishito pepper

Our fence is only five feet tall, so the deer could jump over it if they really wanted to. Our deer are too lazy for that, though. After I made sure the gate stayed closed, they didn't touch the beans again. They did, however, strip the leaves off of the jalapeno plants in a pot right behind the house. Originally I started planting a couple of peppers near the house (where it's a little shadier) in case the deer got the peppers up by the vegetable garden. The deer generally don't get that close to our house. Since we got the fence, though, I guess I should just keep all of them behind the fence.

The cardinal eating blueberries on my patio

I also have to share my harvest with the winged critters. This one cardinal, in particular, thinks he owns everything around my patio. One day I was sitting in my living room and noticed him looking at the me from an evergreen branch outside our window. I saw him jump down, so I walked to the window to get a closer look at what he was doing. Sure enough, he had flown over to one of my small blueberry bushes. He paused and stared at me. I banged on the window to try to scare him off. He just stared back brazenly as he took his blueberry, and then left. I even saw him sharing a bush with his girlfriend one day.

I've started going out every couple of days to pick the ripe blueberries, and it turns out there's still plenty of berries left for me.

While blueberries and beans are at their peak right now, a couple of other vegetables are just becoming ready to pick for the first time.

I picked the most perfect looking 'Cherokee Purple' tomato today. I love the flavor of this heirloom tomato. It's not particularly sweet, but the flavor is rich and deep, so unlike a grocery store tomato. I picked it just a tad underripe--with a little bit of that reddish/purplish color coming in. If I let it go until it's fully ripe, it usually starts getting rot or bugs digging into it. I'll leave it on a windowsill to ripen, and it should be perfect in a day or two.

I also have a new variety I'm growing this year. I planted Shishito peppers from seed early in the year, and now they are big, lush plants. I picked the first one this weekend, but there are a couple more that should be large enough to pick in a few days--and several babies coming behind them! I am quite pleased with how they've turned out. Shishito peppers are delicious sauteed or roasted, but still not common in grocery stores. We've only been able to find them when we are visiting Whole Foods in larger cities. I was afraid they would be hard to grow or whither under our heat. Instead, they seem as easy to grow as jalapenos. I think they will end up being a staple in my garden every year!

You know what I haven't mentioned yet? Zucchini. I'm just not sure I wake up early enough to grow zucchini. I've had a few female flowers from my one plant, but they always just end up withering on the vine. It's a pretty sure indication that they aren't getting fertilized, but by the time I wake up and wander outside, the flowers are all closed up. Also, I'm pretty sure the voles are tunneling in my zucchini roots--the plant went from thriving to wilting every afternoon, with a tell-tale hole right beside it. The odds are not in my favor for harvesting zucchini this year.

Vegetables aren't the only things I planted this year! Here's a shot of the coneflower I added to my flower beds this spring. It's finally getting established.

'PowWow Wild Berry' coneflower with roses

Harvesting Potatoes, Part 2

Last weekend I harvested potatoes from my grow bag, but this week I dug into the potatoes planted in the ground.

I planted them a week later than the ones in the bag, so I figured they would need another week to mature. I didn't wait quite a week--I ended up digging into them when I got home from work Friday evening.

Like the first ones I planted, the plants in the ground had started to yellow a few weeks ago. By the time I dug them up, some of the stalks were completely dead.

I figured out several weeks ago that I had a vole problem. I had seen a few tunnels and holes in my yard for many years, but I never bothered to figure out what they were because they didn't seem to bother my plants. Until now. Back in April, I saw a hole emerge where I had planted my beans, followed by some seeds not sprouting at all, and others being eaten from underground after they got a few inches tall. I've never seen the voles, but with enough Googling, all signs pointed to voles.

So what does this have to do with my potatoes? While I was researching voles, I learned that voles ALSO love to eat root crops like potatoes and carrots. Since then, I have been so nervous about my potatoes in the ground. Would they survive the voles?

Well, the good news is, more than half of my potatoes were untouched by the voles! (What can I say, I'm a glass-half-full kinda girl.)

I carefully dug into my potato trench with a gloved hand and began feeling around for potatoes. With my other hand, I used a dull plastic trowel to gently shovel excess dirt into a bucket. Fortunately, these weren't planted quite as deep as the ones in the grow bag.

In the end, I harvested about the same amount of potatoes from the ground as I did from the grow bag, which, I admit, was a little disappointing. I planted three times as many potatoes in the ground as I did in that grow bag, and prepping that trench was a lot more work than just pouring potting soil in a bag. On the other hand, planting them in the ground was probably a lot cheaper.

If I plant them in the ground again, though, I'm going to have to find a way to either discourage the voles, or keep them out all together by building an underground fence.

Here are the potatoes that the voles got into. Apparently they really like the large ones, and they only eat about half of the potato and just leave the other half to rot underground.

After I pulled the potatoes, I had a bare spot in my veggie bed begging to be filled, and some spare plants needing a more permanent home.

 I planted 'Galapagos' tomato seedlings that were a gift from a friend. It's probably not quite enough space there for another tomato plant, but I really didn't have another space to put them. The internet tells me they are more heat tolerant than most tomatoes, so I was really excited to try them. My tomato plants usually fizzle out in July--I would love a tomato that can still bear fruit in July and August.

I also planted some extra basil seedlings that I didn't know what to do with. After all, what goes better together than tomatoes and basil?

Unlike my potatoes, my lemon verbena is thriving at the moment! It just came into bloom this week. The tiny blossoms aren't very showy, but I think they're pretty. They're edible and smell sweet and lemony, like the leaves.

I planted it about two years ago, and it's getting huge. Everything I read says it can grow into a six-foot-tall shrub. It was hard to imagine when I brought the cute little six-inch-tall plant home from the garden center two years ago. It's about three feet tall now!

The Southern Living Garden Book has a wonderful description of lemon verbena: "it's the herb that grew like a gangling shrub in grandmother's garden. When you read of the 'scent of verbena' in novels of the antebellum South, this is the plant being described." Not being from the South myself, Southern culture always fascinates me, and I'm happy to have a little piece of the "South" in my Georgia garden.

I read you can use lemon verbena in place of lemon zest in recipes, but I haven't tried it. If you're reading this and have any experience cooking with lemon verbena, please share your tips with me!

Harvesting Potatoes

I was so excited to harvest my first potatoes this morning!

The successful treasure hunt was a much-needed mini adventure during a year with a little less traveling than normal.

I had never grown potatoes before, but I had always wanted to. When everyone was freaking out at the groceries stores back in March, it seemed like a good a time as any to cross it off my gardening bucket list. The first ones went into a grow bag a friend had given me.

Everyone thinks gardening requires some magical trait called a "green thumb," but I've found a green thumb is earned, not given. I read as much as I could about growing potatoes before planting them, but without any actual previous experience, I wasn't sure what to expect. My plants started off growing fast and getting huge. Then some storms came through, and the lush stalks flopped over--at least the ones in the grow bag.

The thing about potatoes is, not only were they completely new to me, but they were also covered in eighteen inches of soil. I could see what the tops were doing, but the important part was far out of sight. I just had to have faith that they were making potatoes down there. The suspense was killing me!

Then the leaves--and even some of the stalks--started to turn yellow and brown and die. I started Googling, but with no good answers. Yellowing leaves can either mean they are almost ready to harvest...or that they have a fungal disease that kills the entire plant. Everything said they would flower before they were ready to harvest, but I hadn't seen even a hint of blooms. I tried sticking my hand down in the soil to feel for potatoes, but all I could find was dirt and stalks.

By this morning, a couple of the stalks had rotted completely. I was afraid somewhere underground, my potatoes would start rotting too. I decided it was time to take the leap and starting digging everything up.

When I dug down to the bottom of the bag, the mysteries of potatoes were finally revealed to me. I struck gold! 'Yukon Gold,' that is.

Having confirmed that there were, indeed, potatoes hiding at the very bottom of the bag, I decided to dump the whole thing out to get a better look. Of course I wanted an easier time finding the potatoes, but I also wanted to answer my burning questions: how DO potatoes grow? What is happening underground?

When I planted the potatoes, I planted cut up chunks of potato with an eye or two that some growth coming out of it. Well, just about every eye--even the ones that didn't look like much--ended up having a stalk and some fibrous roots growing out of it. Some of the stalks were stronger than others, depending on the size of the eye. As the stalk and the roots grew, they basically fed off the original potato chunk--it just turned to liquidy mush with a skin left behind. A little bit above that, new potatoes formed along the base of the stem. The large potatoes readily tumbled here and there in the dirt, but there were a few tiny baby potatoes still stuck to the stalks. It just took a little twist to free them.

The larger potatoes took a little more effort to find. You have to be gentle with the potatoes to avoid accidentally cutting or piercing them. I carefully sifted through the dirt with gloves to try to find the remaining potatoes like buried treasure. I read somewhere that you'll get three to five potatoes for every potato piece you plant. Considering it was my first try, I was pleased with the eighteen I found in my bag of soil from only five pieces.

Next weekend I will dig up the potatoes I planted in the ground and see what I find!