Piddling potato harvest

Here were my two potato stacks this morning:

From these I managed to excavate a mere 550 g of potatoes, which I think was actually less than what I planted:

Go figure. This happened last year at Everdale, too. I think potatoes really need a lot of soil depth to grow productively. I only mounded them once because I wasn't able to find any more tires, but had I mounded them at least three times, as I should have, I probably would have ended up with three times as many potatoes.

In other news, I harvested my onions the other day. They were smaller than pearls. Aww. I also picked all my barley, which I didn't bother hulling yet because I don't have the time, so I just put it all in a paper bag. The corn cobs I saved have finally dried out and I "hulled" the kernels off a couple days ago (what do you call the process of popping off the kernels?). They look great. Corn is so easy to grow, so I think it will be a big part of my future farm. Soon, before I move, I have to harvest my flax, lettuce seed, and parsnips.

Bolting over bounty

A couple weeks ago, virtually all of my spinach was bolting. "Bolting" means going to flower. When a leaf crop, such as spinach or lettuce, goes to flower, that's not a good thing, unless your purpose for growing them is to harvest the seeds rather than the leaves (in which case bolting is obviously imperative). Bolted lettuce and spinach leaves are more bitter and generally not marketable.

Heat is a factor that accelerates the flowering process, and my spinach spent most of its life span during the hottest days of May and June, so in a way it's no surprise that it bolted. I just wished they had grown a little bigger before going to flower. They were very slow-growing. I think part of it has to do with flat soil I sowed them in, which wasn't ideal and possibly retarded their growth. Also, I probably could have sowed them much earlier than I did and given them more of a chance to grow during the cooler weeks.

So for a while I had been picking off the flowering heads from all my spinach plants (which I had to do every day). But it was getting to the point where the leaves simply weren't becoming more abundant no matter what I did, so I harvested it all at once.

Much of my Simpson lettuce has also been bolting (though not quite as much), and I can only assume it's doing so for the same reasons my spinach did. I did the same thing for the lettuce as I did for the spinach, but ate the bolting heads because they seemed to be just leaves anyway (and they weren't noticeably bitter yet).

I sowed more spinach and lettuce seeds a few days ago, which I'll plant where my current lettuce resides after it's been harvested. I tried four different types of potting soil mixes - regular 1:1 mix (soil:compost), a 1:3 mix, a 100% compost mix, and a 1:1 mix that happened to have a bit more soil in it than compost. I'm curious to see what's most effective for germination and seedling growth. So far, the 1:1 mix is winning!

Seedlings & sowings

I just realized that what I thought were weeds, might actually be the groundcherries! They look like weeds, perhaps because they are, in fact, considered weeds by many. And if I recall correctly, groundcherry was growing rampantly out on Plan B farm when I was visiting last year. Also, groundcherry is closely related to the tomatillo, which I remember at Everdale confusing with pigweed (before closer inspection). So I may have inadvertantly weeded out some of my groundcherries, but I've saved what I think are two tiny seedlings. The only thing that made these seedlings stand out to me from the other weed seedlings were their fuzzy stems, which I know tomatoes have as well.

Yesterday I began double-digging my fourth raised bed. It's the biggest one so far, and I only got about a third of it fully loosened. That was enough for the time being; I really just had to get two large tomato plants (one Sweetie and one Scotch Bonnet) and several oversized Simpson lettuce seedlings into the ground. Between the two I transplanted a bunch of white globe onion seedlings, which are a companion to both tomatoes and lettuce.

Today I sowed cucumbers, pumpkins, butternut squash, sweet dumpling squash, Pride of Wisconsin melon, and butterfly milkweed. I'm bringing the cucumbers and pumpkins inside during the night since it sounds like they require higher soil temperatures for germination than the other squash (according to the not-so-informative seed packets).

I tried to pick up a rain barrel today from a nearby Freecycler. Unfortunately, it was about 4 inches too wide for my bike trailer, so I had to leave it there. It was big and beautiful – a real functioning rain barrel, not just any old barrel – and it would have worked amazingly. Alas, I just don't have a big enough wagon, and I don't yet know of a local fossil fuel-free wagon producer. ;-)

I was working outside virtually all day today, and that was a mistake. I didn't realize today was a smog day in Toronto. I should have taken a clue from the characteristically orange-tinted sunlight, but I just wasn't thinking. As a result, I've felt a little sick all evening, especially after mowing the front lawn with garden shears. This is the first time I've ever noticed the effects of smog on my health so acutely.