Sunday, October 24, 2010

Sweet potato harvest, end of the summer season


A hot day to dig sweet potatoes. My patch was half the size as previous years'--I planted a bunch of peanuts instead. It's hard to beat the sheer biomass of batatas. In addition to twenty-five or thirty pounds of tubers, there's a big pile of leaves and vines cooking in my tumbler. Digging those potatoes, some of which are a foot below the surface, also serves to aerate the soil. I dug in a ton of compost, fertilized, and then planted my winter garden:

Seeds
  1. Red Ace beets
  2. Super Sugar Snap peas
  3. Javelin F1 parsnips
  4. Sweet Treat carrots
  5. Cherriette radishes
  6. Nantes carrots
  7. Hakurei F1 turnips
Seedlings/Sets
  1. Rainbow chard
  2. Brussels sprouts
  3. White sweet onions
  4. Honey Gold potatoes (very small waxy potatoes I got at Publix)
Anyway, I also did general garden cleanup. About eight hours in the garden. With a hell of a head cold. But today was the only break I have before Christmas.

I already had a bunch of broc, lettuce, cauliflower, rocket, and sweet peas growing. Much of what I seeded today won't produce until March or April.

Man, it's DRY out there. I also spent some time adjusting my microsprayer system, so I could reduce the amount of irrigation. Now the system covers half my garden. It's very effective and uses a fraction of the water used by overhead sprinklers.

Wheh. I'm beat.





1 comment:

Dani said...

Super!! I'm currently gardening vicariously thru you, so keep up the good work :)

Dani in Lake Mary