Thursday, October 15, 2009

sweet potatoes


here are some of our sweet potato harvest. they were so easy to do and flourished. we'll be allocating a much larger portion of our garden to these little (big) favorites next year.

the black plastic mulch method proved a grand success. all we did was prepare the soil, cover the area with black plastic, cut holes in the plastic (i'll use a plumbing torch next time to burn the holes), plant the slips that tabitha started and nurtured since winter. while we went to st louis the cows broke into the garden and ate most of the leaves from them. they bounced back and made tons of tuber in spite of it all.

the whole house has a snotty cold today. it is not completely debilitating but it just as well should be. all it does is leave just enough energy to make me feel anxious about the stuff i need to get done. i have even started a few things and regretted my lack of concentration and exhaustion afterward.

i went to work today a half day. i brought home some leftover polyethylene tubing.

it is enough to make a small row cover for extended salad season. this stuff is pretty cheap and wouldn't need to be this large in diameter. we might have some more left over after the final project. i imagine that it won't hold up against uv exposure for many seasons but we'll see.

i also need to build tabitha a sewing machine/serger cabinet. mostly i need to lock the kids (toly) from nearly ruining it at every opportunity. i'll try to do that this weekend. another task we'd like to get on this weekend is clean out the green house and plant some more greens in there. we want to start our own onions this year from seed and will have to get the greenhouse going so early that we might never really close it down. i'm going to go look at onion varieties any suggestions? we are considered short-day but on the border and could get away with the right long-day variety on the right year.

the wood stove almost chased us out of the house last night. i enjoyed it since i was sickest and could have enjoyed a native american sweat lodge. i hope this illness passes quickly.

5 comments:

kaat said...

get better soon!
(Same here, though not not so bad. Hopefully we'll shake it by the weekend. So much to do!)

LannaM said...

You *could* try Walla Walla onions. I planted some I started indoors from seed, some I started a la winter-sown, and some direct seeded straight into the garden despite still getting a few frosts in May. The ones that did the best were the direct sown ones, ironically.
If I'd thinned them rather than let them grow/clump together, I would've gotten more than the medium-sized onions I still have outside there (need room in the dehydrator/garage to store them before I dig!).
And since you guys plan to dehydrate them anyway (right?) long storage probably wouldn't be as much an issue. Oh, my point - you have a longer season than I do, so you may be able to direct seed and just forget about 'em.

Renee said...

This was our first year that we got soft-ball size onions. We order our sets from Johnnys seeds.

Your sweet potatoes looks great. I just fixed some of ours a couple nights ago and.... yes we will be growing a lot more next year!

I am glad winter is coming but I am already looking forward to spring:)

Renee

Ky

Tipi Homesteaders said...

You're sweet potatoes look wonderful. I'm going to definitely be planting some in our garden next year.

Pablo said...

Good luck getting better.

That oldest boy of yours seems to change from day to day!

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