Sowing

This week is supposed to be rainy and cloudy with chances of sun...sounds like a perfect timing for seed sowing:

Beets (seeds from last year):Early wonder tall top
Snow pea (Mr. Big from last year):
Veg Gin (Gai Lan): I didn't know that West Coast seeds carries this one. So I'm giving it a try!
Carrots: Bolero and Flyaway
Wild Arugula
Radishes: French Breakfast
Mesclun Blend (from last year)

We also got some tomato plants from Mark's mom.
She got the seeds from her UK's trip and started the seeds in her greenhouse. I've planted three of the six (cherry, blood, apero).
The rest are stayed in the coldframe on the patio for now.

The carrot seeds that were sown last month were sprouted for quite a while. Unfortunately, they didn't last long. As I was trying to see how the progress was, I couldn't find any of them at all. Guess they became the meal of the unwelcome insects. So frustrated. We'll have to set up something when the new sown seeds start to sprout.

An update from the potato front: the black fabric got pushed up by the strong potatoe plants. They do grow fast! Time to unveil the patch. The plants are beautiful. Meanwhile, some smaller potatoe plants are growing quietly in the potato bin. The potatoes must be self-seedlings themselves. I can't wait to see how many potatoes we get this year.

Planting potatoes

Mark got some potatoe seedlings from his mom. Since we are growing the garlic in the backyard this year, we decided to use the front patch as potato field. The patch has been in resting mode since the garlic harvest last year. After we planted the potatoes, we covered the patch with the black fabric again to avoid cats' visit.

Last week, we dug through our potato bin. This is all that we've found. I think Mark dug a few up at a time with his dinner throughout the year, so we never know how many potaotes there were in the bin. I do have a feeling that the yield isn't that impressive. Good experiment though.

Potatoes--1st attempt

The branches of the potato plants have started to turn dry and yellow...looks like we can try to dig our hands into the soil to see if there is any goodies. We only searched through the surface area (not deeper than 4 inches) and found a few. We are in no hurry to investigate further as we are still trying hard to catch up with the food that are ready to be harvested in the backyard. The potatoes can stay in the soil a bit longer, we hope.

Aug 2, 2008

Sept 08, 2008

Sept 21, 2008

See the video for our searching attempt and the beautiful finger potatoes. Also, a clip of the pole bean is also included in it.

Our Tower-O-Potatoes

A friend of mine related to me a few years ago a story of a university friend of his. They were grad students at the time, living off tiny stipends, so saving money any way possible was beneficial. So, he grew potatoes in tires. What he did though, was take one seed potato, plant in the ring of a tire and let it grow. When the green broke the surface by a few inches, he added another tire, and barely covered the green with more soil. At the end of the year he was five tires deep and a serious amount of potatoes richer.

So, I did some reading, and this idea wasn't unique to him. It is in fact nothing more than an extreme version of the practice of hilling up potatoes to increase your yield. It seems that all you have to do, is wrap some dirt around a potato plant and it will send off shoots to grow more tubers.

In the same way that economy motivated the friend of my friend, economy forces us to make do with what we have. We have very little space. But we also have big appetites, so, we need to maximize our potato growing capability. This year, we're growing them in a expandable bin. In the pictures you can see two rows of the bin. four feet by two and half feet. Whenever I need to, I build a new ring. I've decided to leave a small gap between the rings for cooling. Supposedly if the soil gets too hot then the potatoes may rot.

I'm not actually sure this is cheaper than buying a couple ten pound bags of russets, but it is probably cheaper than the same amount of the fingerlings we're growing. Besides, these will be better.

The pictures are before and after adding more soil. And, the prone trellis is for cat deterrent. It didn't work though. We have a section of cheap one foot wire fencing that fits perfectly though, and that is keeping the cats out of it.