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.

No shortage of tomatoes

My squash are all suffering from this mildewy thing. It's a little disappointing, but there doesn't look to be anything I can do about it. The cucumbers are still growing, albeit very slowly. I'm hoping to have my first lemon cucumber in maybe a week or so.

Both my pumpkins have been successfully destroyed by the squirrels. Whatever. :P

Tomatoes are doing fine, beans are basically done, peppers seem all right, basil looks good, flowering lettuce are going to seed, flax and barley are getting good and dry, parsley is a little paltry, eggplants are slowly maturing, chard is insane and I'm tired of harvesting it, potatoes are looking really healthy (I just wish I had more tires to stack them higher), valerian is slowly gaining size, and I'm sure I have quite a few other veggies that I've now completely forgotten about.

Point-form updates

• I harvested my first zucchini a couple days ago – fresh as a summer's rain.
• My pole beans turned out in fact to be bush beans. I harvest beans from them every couple days, but they're not producing much, and some of the leaves are yellowing. I don't think they're getting as much sun as they need.
• My friend Jen visited a few days ago and she helped me transplant quite a few lettuce and spinach seedlings, and more are on the way. I keep harvesting lettuce, so there's always more room to plant.
• I keep having to tighten the trellises for my tomatoes; the fabric they're made of is gradually getting stretched. They're pretty effective, though. No longer are the neighbouring onions gasping for sunlight.
• Every day I gently steer a few pumpkin or melon vines to follow the trellises or directions I want. I'm trying to aim them north, out to the back lane where there's space, but they're naturally inclined to grow the other direction, towards the sun.
• I'm still picking off the leaf miner-attacked fragments of my chard leaves on a regular basis.
  
• I mounded up my potatoes a while ago. I couldn't find another tire for one of the stacks, so I made do with bits of brick I've collected from the yard over the summer, which I laid around the edges of the topmost tire. Soon I'm going to have to come up with another solution, though.
  

Potato planting

I left a container of 9 organic potatoes I bought from the store to sprout over the last month and a half. HtGMV says to leave place your seed potatoes in a 3-inch high box and to keep them in a place at room temperature with some air flow and indirect light for a few weeks before you plant them. Here are mine today:

I read a while ago about planting potatoes in a stack of tires. I looked it up again and came across this article. The idea is to plant your potatoes in a couple of old tires filled with soil, and as soon as the potato plant grows to about a foot high, pop another tire on the stack and fill it with soil so that only 2 inches of the plant is now showing. Each time you do that, the plant will grow new tubers in the freshly added soil.

I knew I could rely on my neighbourhood railroad corridor to provide me the needed abandoned tires:

For my first mound, I stacked two tires on a section of concrete that lines my backyard gate, filled them with about a foot of soil mixed with compost, and arranged my spuds on the soil, spaced about 9 inches apart:

I filled the rest of the stack with more soil and compost. I did the same for a second stack, and voilà: