Potato bags, bins and harvests

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We grow potatoes more for the fun than the quantity, since I’m the only one that eats them. This is half of this year’s crop.

This is half of our potato crop. At home we grow them in potato “bags” made of polypropylene. At schools and other places we grow them in storage containers with holes drilled in them. 

One great thing about this method is that once you run out of space in the garden you can just plunk a tub anywhere, regardless of soil quality (or any soil at all) and grow potatoes. Continue reading →

Hold onto your parsley, people!

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Flat leaf parsley. You don’t need to do this much at a time.

Now is the time to harvest and quickly preserve lots of parsley for winter soups (and soup stocks).

Sure, parsley will survive much cooler weather, but as the daylight wanes and cooler daytime temps become the norm, the aesthetic appeal of the plants diminishes and eventually it becomes a bunch of limp, dangling green branches that are halfway to mush. Continue reading →

Compost volunteers in the garden

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Three of the several volunteer pumpkins we’ll get this year.

Composting rarely kills off all tomato and squash seeds. This is one reason that municipal yard waste programs don’t want you to place your pumpkins in yard waste.

If you don’t want the “volunteer” tomato and squash plants that pop up, they’re easy enough to pull. Sometimes, however, they work to your advantage.

Continue reading →

Maple leaves have fallen and we’re all going to live

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Maple Tar Spot. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This is a follow up to the recent post “maple leaves falling and we’re all going to die.”

Turns out, stories of our imminent death may have been premature. I was able to contact Professor George Hudler of Cornell for more information, and he’s got more good news. Continue reading →

Maple leaves are falling and we’re all going to die

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Maple Tar Spot infected leaf. Image used with these permissions: Use:Saforrest, Black tar spot on sugar maple, CC BY-SA 3.0

I’ve received a lot of questions about the diseased Maple leaves falling early and whether they’re safe to compost.

I’m terrible at this whole “don’t give an answer right away in order to drag readers along” so here’s the short answer:

If you hot compost, you can compost them.
If not, send the leaves away.

More explanation and information after the jump. Continue reading →

Portly cukes and the people who eat them

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One of these cukes is not like the other. (Left to right: Tasty Jade, Marketmore 76, overripe Diva, ripe Diva.)

 

Despite best efforts, cucumbers sometimes go unharvested a bit longer than they should. By the time I find them, they’ll be a bit, well, portly. Once they’ve reached that size the seeds can be large and the flesh bitter.

All is NOT lost. Continue reading →

Easy compost turning with video

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Turning compost can be difficult for people with limited upper body strength, a bad back or limited height, depending on the style compost unit you use. Plunging a pitchfork or shovel into a pile is easy, but lifting that material may not be.

What we’ve found is that a long bulb auger does the job well, at the right price. Continue reading →