I decided to head back to the burbs this weekend to harvest my potato crop. On saturday morning, I glanced at my organic garden after a 2 week hiatus in the city and saw a blend of the expected and not so expected. For one thing, the potato plants have more or less browned out, the later maturing varieties looking obviously healthier and less aged than the early maturing breeds. All 3 Potato varieties were ready for harvest. The Corn was looking gloriously vibrant, a dozen man-height corn stalks shot out of the square meter garden bed. The beans were not doing so well. Most of the beans have been damaged by potato beetles, for some reason the pests prefered to eat the bean leaves over potatos. Upon closer inspection, I realized that the native American Kentucky Wonder pole beans were almost entirely wiped out by the bugs, while the European pole beans were only lightly damaged. The discrepancy was glaring, it seemed that just about 1 out of every 2 beans plants have been reduced to skeletonized leaves. While the native American bean plants were all looking like the living dead due to these Eurasian pests, the Eurasian bean plants were only slightly pockmarked by the same beetles.
In short order, I got into the act of harvesting the potatos. It was moderately back-breaking work. Each potato plant was first yanked out of the soil with much of it's root structure. The smaller and moderately sized potatos usually came attached with the plants' roots, the larger potatos were at least dislodged. The individual potatos were collected, and the potato leaves/roots/stems carefully sequestered into it's own pile. It was of utmost importance to remove as much of the potato root structure as possible from the garden bed. The roots, if left in the earth, acts as a disease vector for potato family crops. However, it is also important to maintain the clover and onion ground cover on those same garden beds thus complicating the harvesting effort. After half an hour of harvesting, I had unearthed the entire potato crop.
The 3 breeds of potatos planted all had very specific individual traits. One can almost see the engineering trade-offs made as each variety was selectively bred by humanity. What traits were picked and which ones were discarded all depended on what the people were seeking in their environment. The Yukon Gold breed of brown-skinned potatos clearly scored highest on total yield(over 30% more than the other 2 types), but took weeks longer to mature and showed noticeably more susceptability to beetles and fungus. The Roten variety matured the quickest, demonstrated great pest resilience, and produced a good yield of big, red, and super-starchy taters . But those advantages were offset by the fact that each Roten potato plant was 30% larger than the other varieties, thus decreasing the total number of potato spuds that can be efficiently planted on the same surface area. And then there was the Kennewick breed, it was relatively slow maturing, it's yield was the lowest, it showed the most pest/fungus damage of all. To top it all off, the potatos seem to grow really deep under the plant structure, thus making it a pain to dig out. However, there are redeeming qualities to the Kennewick. These pale white potatos are, without exception, very well proportioned(not too big or small), unlike the other breeds. The Kennewicks are also possessed of this very smooth, almost tender white skin that contrasts very sharply with the rough and thick skins of the Yukon Gold and the Roten. One could almost imagine that the Kennewick variety may have been selectively breed as some sort of elite status food. I gathered up the potatos and put them onto a flat bench in my garage to dry off. After half a day of drying, those potatos can be put into the cellar and kept for many months. All in all, the yields were 31 lbs of Yukon Gold, 23 lbs of Roten, and 19 lbs of Kennewick, a total of 73 pounds of potatos cultivated from 2.5 square meters of earth.
With the potato harvest completed, I decided to see if I couldn't recoup my bean plant losses. After seeing the selective damage done by the Japanese beetles, I launched a genocidal campaign against these bugs. Gloves in hand, I combed through the entire garden and killed every single Japanese beetle that I found. I gathered hundreds of their tiny corpses in a cup, mixed in a bit of water and grounded them into a fine paste. Most of this liquid fertilizer, I dumped into the compost mounds, but some of it I saved for what I had in mind. I quickly replanted European variety pole beans at the sites of the dead Native American bean plants, And to jump start the bean growth process, I added some of the diluted beetle puree to each bean seed as I planted them. As the beetles have so heartily fed on the defenseless beans in life, so shall they, in turn, be feed to the beans in death. As I was doing this, I harvested about half a pound of pole beans, 2 fallen green tomatos and a pound of green onions.
With the bug-fighting campaign out of the way, I started working on my hot composting bins. Taking the 2 potato growning containers, I methodically applied a layer of dirt followed by a layer shredded potato plants/lawn grass/leaf clippings/kitchen vegetable clippings for some 4 iterations per container. After which, each container was given a cups of diluted urine to jump start the decomposing process. Finally gallons of water was applied to each compost bin, and then both bins were covered with hemp fabric to keep it extra warm and toasty inside. Last summer I was able to see some luminous biomatter coming from the compost bins during the hottest summer months. This year, I plan to get a few snapshots of it. So it was not too bad for a day's work in the garden.
I decided to head back to the burbs this weekend to harvest my potato crop. On saturday morning, I glanced at my organic garden after a 2 week hiatus in the city and saw a blend of the expected and not so expected. For one thing, the potato plants have more or less browned out, the later maturing varieties looking obviously healthier and less aged than the early maturing breeds. All 3 Potato varieties were ready for harvest. The Corn was looking gloriously vibrant, a dozen man-height corn stalks shot out of the square meter garden bed. The beans were not doing so well. Most of the beans have been damaged by potato beetles, for some reason the pests prefered to eat the bean leaves over potatos. Upon closer inspection, I realized that the native American Kentucky Wonder pole beans were almost entirely wiped out by the bugs, while the European pole beans were only lightly damaged. The discrepancy was glaring, it seemed that just about 1 out of every 2 beans plants have been reduced to skeletonized leaves. While the native American bean plants were all looking like the living dead due to these Eurasian pests, the Eurasian bean plants were only slightly pockmarked by the same beetles.
In short order, I got into the act of harvesting the potatos. It was moderately back-breaking work. Each potato plant was first yanked out of the soil with much of it's root structure. The smaller and moderately sized potatos usually came attached with the plants' roots, the larger potatos were at least dislodged. The individual potatos were collected, and the potato leaves/roots/stems carefully sequestered into it's own pile. It was of utmost importance to remove as much of the potato root structure as possible from the garden bed. The roots, if left in the earth, acts as a disease vector for potato family crops. However, it is also important to maintain the clover and onion ground cover on those same garden beds thus complicating the harvesting effort. After half an hour of harvesting, I had unearthed the entire potato crop.
The 3 breeds of potatos planted all had very specific individual traits. One can almost see the engineering trade-offs made as each variety was selectively bred by humanity. What traits were picked and which ones were discarded all depended on what the people were seeking in their environment. The Yukon Gold breed of brown-skinned potatos clearly scored highest on total yield(over 30% more than the other 2 types), but took weeks longer to mature and showed noticeably more susceptability to beetles and fungus. The Roten variety matured the quickest, demonstrated great pest resilience, and produced a good yield of big, red, and super-starchy taters . But those advantages were offset by the fact that each Roten potato plant was 30% larger than the other varieties, thus decreasing the total number of potato spuds that can be efficiently planted on the same surface area. And then there was the Kennewick breed, it was relatively slow maturing, it's yield was the lowest, it showed the most pest/fungus damage of all. To top it all off, the potatos seem to grow really deep under the plant structure, thus making it a pain to dig out. However, there are redeeming qualities to the Kennewick. These pale white potatos are, without exception, very well proportioned(not too big or small), unlike the other breeds. The Kennewicks are also possessed of this very smooth, almost tender white skin that contrasts very sharply with the rough and thick skins of the Yukon Gold and the Roten. One could almost imagine that the Kennewick variety may have been selectively breed as some sort of elite status food. I gathered up the potatos and put them onto a flat bench in my garage to dry off. After half a day of drying, those potatos can be put into the cellar and kept for many months. All in all, the yields were 31 lbs of Yukon Gold, 23 lbs of Roten, and 19 lbs of Kennewick, a total of 73 pounds of potatos cultivated from 2.5 square meters of earth.
With the potato harvest completed, I decided to see if I couldn't recoup my bean plant losses. After seeing the selective damage done by the Japanese beetles, I launched a genocidal campaign against these bugs. Gloves in hand, I combed through the entire garden and killed every single Japanese beetle that I found. I gathered hundreds of their tiny corpses in a cup, mixed in a bit of water and grounded them into a fine paste. Most of this liquid fertilizer, I dumped into the compost mounds, but some of it I saved for what I had in mind. I quickly replanted European variety pole beans at the sites of the dead Native American bean plants, And to jump start the bean growth process, I added some of the diluted beetle puree to each bean seed as I planted them. As the beetles have so heartily fed on the defenseless beans in life, so shall they, in turn, be feed to the beans in death. As I was doing this, I harvested about half a pound of pole beans, 2 fallen green tomatos and a pound of green onions.
With the bug-fighting campaign out of the way, I started working on my hot composting bins. Taking the 2 potato growning containers, I methodically applied a layer of dirt followed by a layer shredded potato plants/lawn grass/leaf clippings/kitchen vegetable clippings for some 4 iterations per container. After which, each container was given a cups of diluted urine to jump start the decomposing process. Finally gallons of water was applied to each compost bin, and then both bins were covered with hemp fabric to keep it extra warm and toasty inside. Last summer I was able to see some luminous biomatter coming from the compost bins during the hottest summer months. This year, I plan to get a few snapshots of it. So it was not too bad for a day's work in the garden.
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