October 19, 2017

Good morning,   I love puns or at least playing with words!

It is time to pea. Yes my first fall planting is going in the ground. Then some time in mid to late December my second bed will go in. With the use of fabric it is very easy to over winter small pea plants. Then by March they take off with growth and soon start to fruit. Before doing fall planting, my pea season was very short.

 Spring plantings would get a good start but begin to bloom in hot temps. The harvest would be short.

Fall planting would begin to bloom when freezing weather arrived and would slaughter most all the pea blossoms .

Late fall plantings allow for long harvests starting in March and have had them continue well into May. I think deep well established roots is the key.

This has been done several years now and appears to be working.

Another crop that I have been fusing with to get decent repetitive harvests are Irish potatoes.

I have done the usual spring order of seed potatoes, planted them in a trench and back fill as they grew. This was a lot of work with marginal success. then I tried post holes and slowly back fill with water when I watered the young spuds. This had similar success.

Save for only the years we get freezing rain and snow, five inches down in the soil horizon, soil temps rarely get much below 45 degrees. I would like to have a soil probe to see what the seasonal fluctuation really is. I have gone to planting small potatoes ( less than 2 inch in size) in the fall.

Originally  this was done in October. This seemed to work well until we had warm temps well into December and the spuds sprouted. Of course the tops were killed when it finally froze. In the spring I found most of these plants had spuds to close to the surface and greened. Not an eating quality for spuds.

After this happened  the planting was delayed into late November. Individual holes are dug a handful of alfalfa pellets are tossed into the hole before placing the seed potato and the hole is back filled. Once warmer spring weather arrives these spuds raise their heads. Not all at the same time but staggered over the spring. This makes for a prolonged harvest that keeps Deb and I in spuds for most of the year.

As I have mentioned I have been using a thyme oil extract to combat my RKN pets. Save for okra and tomatoes this has worked quite well, or at least I get harvests where I used to not get them.

Any way I diverge, this extract seems to increase harvest (garden wide) and it also combats soil borne fungus's too.

This year when I harvested potatoes, harvest quantities have increased  with each plant. They have increased from ounces to upwards of 2 + pounds per plant.A dramatic increase. Also I must make note that several of the spuds are in excess of a pound. One California white weighed in at 22 ounces, a big hand full of a spud. 

With the above mentioned  late November planting, this year I have  had three harvests and will have a forth once we get a killing freeze. Another thing I have noticed is that the spuds have prolifically bloomed. These blooms were pollinated and produced a couple pounds of potato berries. I am letting these fully ripen so that the seeds from within can be extracted. I am clueless as to what kind of spuds these  seeds could produce. For me this is exciting. I have more of these berries than what I can use so if anyone would like to give them a whorl, let me know. I would be glad to share.

I continue to be optimistic that the summer veggies to winter veggies will be a smooth transition. Time will tell as more of the summer veggies are finished. This has been a nice run.