Potato Bucket Results: Disappointing

This year I tried a variation on the potato buckets that did so well for me last year.  But 2010 was a very different growing season than 2009.  In fact, you could say the two years were opposite extremes.  And the method that worked well in 2009's conditions performed poorly in 2010's.

June of 2009 was a month of rain that was nearly Old Testament in its lack of moderation.  That led to all my potato plants in the ground developing late blight in early August.  But the potatoes in buckets, with their better drainage and higher elevation leading to better air flow around the plants, resisted the blight for an additional month after all the others were finished.  I saw pretty good yields out of those buckets. 

Not so this year.  We had hardly a drop of rain all summer, which is quite unusual for this area, plus heat that was higher than average.  I discovered that potatoes don't particularly love the heat.  The ones in buckets fared especially poorly.  In the beginning of the growing season I had situated them on the driveway.  My thinking was that I would be getting some production out of an otherwise unusable space. Of course, I couldn't know at the time what sort of summer was in store, but this was a bad move.  And I should have corrected the mistake by removing the buckets from the blacktop once the heat set in.  But - and I won't bore you with excuses - I didn't.

The yields I saw from these buckets were too embarrassing to report here.  Really abysmal.  Suffice it to say I'm glad that we had potatoes in the ground as well.  That said, I don't think the new design of my self-watering buckets was at fault.  I suspect the water reservoir was the only reason I got any harvest at all.  Had I avoided the foot infection that kept me from watering for several of the hottest days of the summer, yields might have been a bit better.  My feeling is that my real mistake was keeping them on the blacktop when it was clear that they were struggling with the heat.  Chili peppers or tomatoes might have fared better there.

I will certainly try potatoes in buckets again next year.  The harvest remains as easy as ever: tip the bucket into a wheelbarrow and pick out the spuds.  It's even possible that I might position the buckets on the driveway again if we were to have another atypically cold and wet year.  But in an average or hotter than average year in this region, my observations suggest they'll do better somewhere else.

Horrific Heat

This gardening year certainly has been a change from last year.  We got rain almost every single day in June last year.  This year it's been incredibly dry and unseasonably hot since the beginning of June.  I've never had to water a garden so much in my life, and I've gardened in three extremely diverse climates.  Frankly, it's been a struggle to keep the plants watered.  But for a brief respite last week, the daytime temperatures have reached into the 80's and 90's most of the last four weeks.  Today, we're supposed to see 97 F (36 C).

I spent about 90 minutes watering the garden this morning, starting at 5 am.  I got some help from my husband's rain barrel, which he rigged up so that we could lay out a slow drip line through my three sisters planting.  All the corn fields around us look parched.  The plants are stressed, with their long leaves tightly furled and pointing upwards, giving them all a spiky appearance.  My own popcorn plants look somewhat better, but they're still not thrilled with the dry heat.  I hope the constant drip from the rain barrel along with my spot watering will see them through.

So far, the plant in the picture above is our only definitive casualty of the heat.  That's one of our two Hokkaido squash plants.  Over the last few days I watered it like crazy.  In the heat of the day, no amount of water seemed to perk it up, though it bounced back in the cool of evening.  Yesterday evening though, it still looked miserable and limp. It looked no better this morning, despite the extra watering I gave it yesterday.  Hokkaido is a northern region of Japan, where the sort of heat we're having would be very unusual.  So I guess it's no surprise this plant couldn't hack it.  The other Hokkaido plant looks to be doing alright, and I hope I can keep it alive.  I grew these last year and they are not prolific producers.  So the loss of one plant will mean a serious reduction in our squash supply this year.

On the other hand, a simple row cover has allowed us to keep several lettuce plants alive and well through the infernal heat.  This is a double layer of floating row cover, arranged so that the bed is shaded to the south.  It's pinned up on the north side to allow good airflow and prevent the row cover from making the bed even hotter than it otherwise would be.  It seems that simply keeping the soil temperature cooler, and the dark leaves out of direct sunlight allows the lettuce to tolerate the excessive heat and dryness.

They're saying we may get some rain on Friday, but we have another week of scorching weather to get through first.  I guess we have no worries about the late blight at the moment.  But this is a steep price to pay for that reassurance.

P.S.  Most of you who asked for kale seed have a small packet on the way in the mail.  I temporarily ran out of envelopes, but the rest of you should have your packets this week.

It's Getting to be a Real Saga

I updated you a little too soon on the bees.  It's been one thing after the other with my beekeeping debut.  I left the house for a few hours yesterday and returned home to my husband's account of the Russian bees swarming over the garden, dispersing wildly and then all roaring back home twenty minutes later.  I missed it.  We were both mystified, considering how much work the bees were putting into building comb and collecting pollen.  This morning early I opened up Izhevsk to see what I can see.  The short answer was not much.  There was pollen in some cells.  I didn't see the queen or any eggs, but the colony had more gorgeous white comb than the last time I checked and still seemed active and numerous.  I figured I just missed the queen and that any eggs or brood were obscured by the bees thickly covering the comb, which could have been because they were trying to keep brood warm on a chill morning.

I worked in the garden today until early afternoon.  I decided to wind up my outdoor work with a little beehive viewing, just as it was clouding up before a predicted rainstorm.  That's when I saw the cluster of bees on the grass, about 20 feet straight out from the hive.  Sure enough, there was a bee with a white dot on her thorax: the queen.  Rain was now immanent.  I set the lawn chair over the little cluster of bees to keep them dry, then rushed inside to get help from my husband and to jump into my bee suit as fast as ever I could.  We grabbed our bee tool bucket and got the smoker going as quickly as possible.  By the time we got back to the bees, the rain was beginning.

We whiffed a few puffs of smoke at the hive, and at the bees on the ground, as fat rain drops came down.  Then as quickly but as gently as I could, I brushed some of the bees into a plastic planter, rushed over to the hive just as my husband opened it, and dumped the bees in.  I'm pretty sure I got the queen, but not 100%.  And there's a chance I might have injured her as I tried to return her to the hive.  Then there's the likelihood that she was out on the grass overnight with a small group of bees.  Who knows?  I could only try to do my best in a dicey situation.

When the rain let up a short time later, I took a look around the hive and didn't see any clusters of bees, so the queen may well be in the hive.  The rain probably would have been the end of her, or at least tonight's low temperature would have been the end of a group of wet bees.  If our frantic efforts work to restore a functioning queen to her hive, and if the Russians don't swarm out again on the next sunny day (Tomorrow?  Friday?), it'll be a miracle.

I'm having a rough start to this beekeeping thing.  It's going to get easier than this, right?

Bad News - Good News

The Italian bees have gone.  They were clustering on the bottom of their screened bottom board early yesterday morning when I went to tend the hens, and gone by lunchtime. The queen had made her way out of her cage and they had even started to build some comb.  But there were only a few confused and sad looking bees wandering helplessly around the inside of the hive when I checked on them.  Of course I'm disappointed that they chose to leave.  But I wish them well in the world and hope they make it out there.  I attended the local beekeepers' meeting last night, told my sad tale, and begged for any leads on a replacement package.  The experienced beekeepers found my story very odd, and packages are in very short supply.  I may have to try to catch a swarm if I want two colonies, or settle for just one.

On a more positive note, the Russians are doing great.  They have a significant start on their comb building, and very little burr comb (that's "non-regulation" comb - comb built where a beekeeper doesn't want it).  It looks like Izhevsk will be a strong colony.

Another positive note is that I got a bunch of ramps for transplanting.  The few I put in two years ago are still alive, but their numbers don't seem to have changed at all, so I still don't feel I can harvest any.  I'm going to put these new ramps in several locations and see where they do best.  If I manage to make them happy enough to propagate well, ramps could help bridge the garlic gap, which we're facing right now.  No more fully formed garlic from the garden until late June at the earliest. 

Potato Blight

Well, I unexpectedly and rather unhappily spent a good deal of time today dealing with potato blight. As it turns out, I have the dubious honor of being the first resident of my county to report a case of blight on potatoes. I knew I had to act quickly once I had identified it, but I had questions about how I might salvage some of the potatoes in the ground, if that were possible. Fortunately I did one smart thing; I called my county Agricultural Extension office. After briefly describing what I'd seen (darkish spots on the potato leaves, not starting at the leaf tip, and a faint white, fuzzy ring around the spot on the underside of the leaf), the Extension officer asked to come to our property to collect a sample for testing. I told him to come right over.

It was fortunate that I called him because he gave me good advice. We found the blight on only one of the four varieties of potato I planted this year, the La Ratte heirloom potato. Without his expert advice I would have pulled all these plants out of the ground, salvaged what potatoes I could find, and would have bagged the green parts of the plant for destruction. His advice was to cut the infected plants right down to ground level instead. He told me that the airborne fungal spores on the leaves will not travel down into the ground through the vascular system of the plant. (There are cases however of infected seed potatoes, in which the blight damages the plant from the ground upwards.) Had I dug for the potatoes in the process of getting the plants out, spores from the leaves would certainly have made contact with the potatoes. So right now, the tubers are probably not infected. But if the ground is disturbed, the spores may find their way onto the surface of the potatoes, which can then become badly infected during storage. Rain helps move spores from the leaves to the ground, and as the potatoes grow in the earth, they tend to crack the dirt apart, providing a perfect avenue of infection. He advised me to get rid of all traces of the above ground plants, let them bake in the sun in black plastic bags and wait a few days before digging up any spuds. I did that, then came inside to take a shower in order to get rid of any spores I had on me. The clothes I wore were washed and hung in the sun to dry. Then I sterilized the tool I used to cut the potato plants.

I plan to give it a few days before trying to harvest the potatoes. With some luck, I will have a limited crop of new potatoes from this variety. They won't store well and will need to be eaten up very soon. With a great deal of luck, I may have saved the other varieties of potatoes I'm growing from infection. But I'm not holding out too much hope there. I'd be fairly surprised if the other plants don't show blight soon, given our weather forecast of rain tomorrow.

I know I'm late with the Action Item for this month. I'll try to have it posted tomorrow. It's been a busy August thus far.

Canning Update: Observations, Successes and Busts

I mentioned as how I was going to start pressure canning this year. (Can it really have been more than a month ago? Where did August go?) I said planned on canning tomato sauce, borscht soup, and salsa. Well, I gotta tell you, I've had very mixed results.

The pressure canning itself is pretty straightforward and less nerve wracking than I had feared. Nothing's exploded in my kitchen yet, anyhow. But my very first foray into pressure canning left me feeling mightily depressed. After a deal of work making a large batch of borscht from garden vegetables that included our beets, tomatoes and savoy cabbage, as well as some carrots donated by another gardener, then canning it all in quart jars...well, the results looked just godawful. This is a picture of the one jar that didn't seal, probably because it was overfilled. All the others popped themselves shut. But the color was horrid in every case, and the cabbage looked like it had been boiled to death in there. Given that the jars were under 10 pounds of pressure for 45 minutes, I guess that's a pretty accurate description.

I was so dispirited. I couldn't even persuade my normally brave husband to try my experimental first run; it was that bad. Looks like we'll chalk this one up to learning the ropes. Unless someone who sounds like they know their business comes along and offers a canning-proof borscht recipe, (please?) I'm sticking my borscht in the freezer from now on, just as I did last year. Humph!

Happily, the tomato sauce went much better. The tomatoes have been coming in slowly this year. And I don't have enough equipment to make very large batches of sauce at one time. But still I've gotten 8 quarts of roasted tomato sauce put away. My intentions of making salsa have been forestalled by the sluggish production of the tomato plants. But I may well get around to that before tomato season winds down. I would guess we still have a few weeks of good beefsteak tomatoes left to us, if the weather kindly cooperates.

So, yes. Baby steps in the canning department this year. I hope to get more proficient and braver with the process as time goes on. I also plan to can some apple butter in the fall when our apples ripen up. I'm almost at the point of being ready to say, "I'm ready for fall and all the apple chores."

Got any good canning recipes you want to share? Please, please do so in the comments!