Tag Archives: posted by Caroline

Garlic Scapes: mean we’ll be harvesting in less than a month!

Baby Peas: eat them straight off the vine!

Bell Peppers:

That Tomato‘s getting bigger:

Corn’s coming up nicely:

With beans planted in between each row of corn, to a) add Nitrogen to the soil and b) hold on to the corn, keeping it from getting blown over in a thunderstorm:

And we’re still eating two salads a day!

We spent this past Sunday afternoon recovering from our best-ever shearing party by selectively harvesting some new potatoes.

If you’ve never dug potatoes before, let me tell you: it is absolutely a ton of fun. It’s just like a treasure hunt, except a) you already know exactly where the treasure’s buried and b) the treasure is POTATOES.

We had planted the whole bed rather densely, and, really, it needed to be thinned. So, Sunday, we thinned out half the bed. We’re saving the other half for next week.

This is how you harvest new potatoes:

First, you pull up the top of the plant. You’ll find it growing out of the old seed potato (it’ll be easy to tell which one that is, since the seed potato starts to disintegrate around this point), with tuber-laden roots sticking out in all directions.

 Then comes the fun. After putting the easy pickings in your basket, you get to sift through the loosened dirt with your hands (and a pitchfork), in search of the light-colored flash of a rogue potato. It’s like digging up treasure, or panning for gold. You’re muddling along in the dirt, and, all of a sudden, you find a tiny edible thing! It’s fantastic!

We thinned in two-foot-wide swaths, working across the length of the bed. The tops of the plants should fill those cleared spaces back in pretty quickly.

 It was a lovely afternoon, cool and breezy, and the work was a real group effort– no one wanted to be left out of the fun of digging!

 After sifting the soil to a satisfactory degree, you hill up the loosened dirt around the remaining potato plants themselves. This gives them a little extra support, while encouraging them to send out some more tuberous roots a little higher up the plant.

 And, here you have them: our beautiful, delicate, precious, delicious, little pommes de terre.

 How much did we get from thinning out half a bed that’s been in production for, at most, a month and a half?

That’s a lot of potatoes, folks. I’ve been looking forward to these potatoes so much, and am thrilled that we were able to get enough to keep for ourselves and to share.

Have you all started harvesting from your gardens yet? What are you looking forward to eating?