a couple of beds on october first

the jerusalem artichokes in my bed at the community garden have seen much better days this season so i cut them back...mostly because they are done...

i stuck the spading for on a corner of the bed and popped up a root ball that had a good number of tubers attached...

four square feet of garden bed rendered just over two hundred tubers...

two bags of tubers weighed in at a total of eight pounds thirteen and one quarter ounce...prolific reproduction is why they are such effective colonizers...i am certain i did not retrieve all the tubers from that two foot by two foot area..there will be plants in the spring no matter what...

there is still a season going on...some wanted..and some probably not so much so...first, the asparagus is doing fine still and has thrown up four new fall spears...they may be entirely too late to "fern" and feed the roots but it is a good sign of healthy root systems and a sure sign of autumn...

on the other hand a surface clearing of the beds did little to discourage the carolina horse nettle...it is a deeply rooted perennial nightshade and it has deployed more leaves to feed them...it will be a perennial chore to clear...thorny too.

solanum blooms

just a little solanum morphology...first four carolina horse nettle...last two early blue potatoes...fifth...mind the horse nettle thorns.

solanum in the garden

i hadn't been tot he community garden in a few days...life has been militating against a trip but it relented a bit this morning so i went...the fist thing i found was a failure...the replacement tesointe has died ( first photo )....so even though it is late i believe i will germinate a replacement and keep trying...the other plant has deployed a fourth leaf and seems happy enough ( second photo )...and the rest of the bed seems to be doing well...the egyptian walking onion ( third photo ) is almost two feet tall and the aerial bulb is coming along...the spuds ( fourth ) are looking robust and there is an ear of rye ( fifth ) racing to finish before it is subsumed by the growing jerusalem artichokes ( sixth )...i looked in on my government spuds this morning and found the time to plant had arrived ( another trigger for a trip ) so i went and planted five more spuds..a dark red ( seventh ) which is not a government, rather a locally procured seed potato...one from accession bs286 ( eighth ) ..a blue shetland ( ninth )...one from accession gs427...and an early blue ( tenth )...finally i deiscovered some carolina horsenettle growing in the old biology club bed...i took some home..more on that in the next post.

spuds 2017

after i got back from the community garden i went out to a local farm market and bought eight pounds ( approximately ) of seed potatoes..half each of red pontiac and yukon gold...i cut enough to make seventeen plants and will be putting them in at the community garden and in my back yard tomorrow after they have calloused...add in eleven tubers that were chitting away merrily and we are up to twenty eight plants that will need homes...i put the chitted ones in peat pots to let them develop until after the danger of frost has passed...the smaller ones i left downstairs under the lights with the yema de huevos to get a bit bigger and the ones that were further along went out into the real world on the deck where they can be covered or brought in depending on the frost forecast...there was potting today...tomorrow will being real planting outdoors and in the soil...stay tuned..

not what you think

first actual spuds of the season...finally...they don't look like the reds you buy at the supermarket...they are elmer's blur ( i the first four photos ) and early blue in the last three...both are indicative of the genetic diversity to be found in the 5000 or so varieties of spuds in the world...as they continue come in some will be eaten...some passed along to friends..and the smaller ones planted in the basement to grow over the winter for seed potatoes in spring...the garden never really ends...just move around.

identified

the thorny plant with the potato-like blooms in the first four photos has been identified as carolina horsenettle...which, unsurprising;ly, is a member of the solanum family and a cousin to the potato...it is also a nightshade ( like its cousins the potato and the tomato ) and is toxic to humans..it is a native of the southeast united states and has been steadily migrating to the north and west( although the usda classifies it as native in most of the contiguous forty eight states )..whether this is a marker of climate change or not is not clear to me ( yet )...however this is the very first time i have encountered this particular nightshade and i was immediately struck by the close resemblance between its flowers and the potato blossoms in the last three photos ( papa chonka, nevskii, and early blue respectively )...i will be on the look out for more of this...in the community garden, at home, and while wandering around...curious to see how prevalent it might be.