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!