silks, spuds, visitors

it was not raining when i got to the campus garden...despite an overcast sky...so the first thing i did was water and then took a look around the beds...

the asparagus was upright and the two summer spears are beginning to "fern"...

the hopi turquoise in my bed is doing well...there was some robust japanese bottle grass ( aka foxtail ) in there as well...it is gone now...there's stinging nettle in there too...i had no gloves...pulling it will wait...

all the maize plants have at least one ear in process...which is good...

one of the volunteer spuds had died back...

and it lived up to my expectations by producing a fair handful of elmer's blue fingerlings...which will be lunch...or dinner...or something sometime...

the bed did have some visitors...this harbinger of autumn...and, more pleasingly for me if no one else...

for the first time in the nine or so years i have been affiliated with this garden i saw leaf cutter bees in my garden bed...

of course they were not on the alfalfa i deliberately planted there for their benefit ( they are alfalfa leaf cutter bees...but do not be fooled by the label...back yard experience has shown they have a capacity to utilize other plants with no seeming ill effects )...

no, they were all buzzing about...

the maize flowers....just like out in my back yard

spuds

there are twenty-seven asparagus spears up in the campus garden, however none are quite ready to harvest...

aside form that the garden is looking rather austere..this will be changing a bit later this month as, among other things, tree planting on campus is on the menu...

there is some growth going on in my bed...the smaller of the two alfalfa plants i transplanted eleven days ago had adapted well while the larger plant seems to have shocked a bit..there seems to be less green than there was...still there is green and we will look for new growth next time out...

kimberly always told me to plant potatoes on good friday..and here we are so i turned the bed again and dug two trenches a shovel deep and a shovel wide and spread compost along the bottom of the trenches...

in the trench along the west side i planted morene...

tacna...

michigan purple...

basadre...

and a german butterball at the very north end...

in the trench on the east side i planted four elmer's blue, another german butterball, and a bison...

i back filled the trenches to cover the spuds to a depth of about three inches and now we wait...i left a space on the north end for some maize and the center of the bed will probably be populated by peppers and tomatoes...if the winter's indoor seasons pays off well enough the may be a couple of mashua tubers going in as well...and perhaps some sweet clover around the edges for the bees...after the spuds are established and the trenches filled back in.

an afternoon with some andean tubers

the largest of the basement mashua plants has died back and it has decided to leave me with three healthy sized tubers from a season in great indoors...i am inordinately pleased...

yesterday i acquired some half barrels so i took two of them out to the east side of the yard and drilled drainage holes in them...

one i filled almost to the top with a mixture of compost and soil...and a few earth worms i found along the way...

and i planted all three tubers as deep as they are long in it and now we will see if this has the desired effect...

the other barrel i filled less than a third of the way and planted a mix of german butterball, all blue, and elmer's blue potatoes...we will continuously back fill this and see just haw many spuds are in a barrel...

some of the government spuds had started to chit and so i placed a shallow layer of soil in two of the infamous blue buckets and planted the two bison potatoes each in their very own habitat...another back fill to the top experiment...if fact all the newly planted outdoor spuds ( there are many yet to do ) will be of this ilk...

for the DTO-2 ( i have no idea what that designation means...names like viking and barbara are given by the breeders who "develop" the variety from the potato's genetic diversity...grow some from seed sometime and you will be surprised by what comes up...i promise ) i did the same shallow layer in a ten gallon pot and planted both...so...andean tubers in the soil a long way from home...they have done well in the past ( even if last season's mashua was a disappointment...too much shade where they were planted i think...they will have more sun this year )...there is a zea day coming soon enough...japanese beetles too i'l wager..all in a season.

community garden today

there isn't a lot going in the garden these days...a few marigold...and a couple of green tomatoes...and those are there only because the frost is seemingly on vacation...

the asparagus is still green for the same reason...so, for nte nonce, there's no need to mulch it...

you can tell the season isn't over yet because the plants are producing ( if sparsely ) more berries...i harvested four of the ripe ones fro additional seed...

the potatoes in the asparagus bed were certainly done though...

the plants yielded sixty-four elmer's blue fingerling potatoes...which will be part of lunch...

for the rest of lunch i ambled over tot he jerusalem artichoke bed where a mionimal ( and i mean minimal ) amount of rooting around in the soil yielded more than enough tubers to go with the spuds...i am thinking fried.