early august on campus

the beds were not parched when i got to the campus garden this morning...however it was near ninety degrees ( fahrenheit ) yesterday and is forecast to be in the eighties today so i watered to be on the safe side of the hydrological necessities...

around the beds i watered squash and tomatoes, cucumbers and collards...

and some prime samples of carolina horse nettle...

the asparagus is doing just fine as evidenced by the emergence of yet another summer spear...

over in my bed things are moving along...

the alfalfa seems to be fully recovered form both the shock of its move and the early season overabundance of water...

the maize is coming along...slowly...the row seems robust and the largest of the plants has reached almost three feet in height...still...even with the warmth it seems stalled compared to last season...much like the industrial fields hereabouts...

at the other end one of the tillers on the zea mays mexicana has begun to flower and there are silks emerging...hoping for seed...

finally, this german butterball was pretty much done...so i popped it up...

it yielded half a dozen tubers that weighed in at fourteen and a half ounces...which brings the average yield per plant up to eleven and five eights ounces...we will see if that continues to climb as the season porogresses.

potato harvest

the potato plants i noticed finishing up yesterday came in today...two german butterballs ( first through fourth ) and an all blue ( fifth and sixth )..all cleaned up ( seventh ) they look a lot like lunch with some of the garlic i brought in and maybe a "garden fresh" salad.

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..

planting spuds

in a move that may shock some and gratify others i have decided to do away with jerusalem artichokes in the bed on the south side of the house this year and plant a bed of spuds instead ( that i would plant spuds should surprise no one...you can also see by the first two photos i have any number that needed to be planted )...so i prepared the bed with a few bags of topsoil and a few more bags of compost and had at it...papa chonca, early gem, crozon rosado, and nevskii...all government potatoes, went in first ( in the fourth though seventh photos )...then some early blue and elmer's blue followed by the standards such as german butterball and red pontiac..i also planted some tubers that came from plants i grew from true seed ( tenth photo ) this will be the third generation of clones from those true seed plants...hopefully they will be a bit bigger this time around...i'd like to ample one instead of continually saving them as seed...it is time to start preparing for leaf cutter bees too...i have some alfalfa growing out back but alfalfa is auto toxic and i cannot seed the patch with more...so i will container grow some and place it near the bee house for convenient access...the outdoor season is taking hold...there will be more reports as things liven up.

rhizomes and a stolon

the german butter ball in the top photo and the all red in the second were chitting away eight days ago when i planted them and they haven't really slowed down since...neither has leafed yet but both have been busy producing rhizomes as they expand their root systems...the roots emerge from the top of the seed tuber which is why the plant will produce no tubers deeper than the depth the seed tuber was planted at...so we hill them to stimulate the growth of more rhizomes and so spuds...the ollala in the third photo had produced a rhizome very close to the surface in a container that is pretty much already filled to capacity with soil...i tried to cover it but it found the light and became a stolon...and now i am fairly sure it isn't even a stolon anymore...it has begun to leaf ( not a bad thing...a little more energy expended but more leaves to feed the roots should translate inot more spuds ) so i will have to call it a stem...potato progress downstairs.