funny little sign outside Tallahassee Nurseries

You Say Potato

The garden bounced back beautifully from the mid-March frost. The tomato plants have grown 4-5 inches and have small yellow flowers. The lettuce is becoming leafy and the cucumbers have even started sprouting new leaves. All this activity encouraged me to round out the garden with two rows of squash, cantaloupe and honeydew melons.

When I’m out at the garden, I usually work my way around each bed, pull weeds, try to avoid fire ants and zone out. It’s a great physical release and cheap mental therapy. I was extra-zoned the other day and started yanking up some rather tough weeds. I snapped out of it and realized the entire bed was filled with similar looking leafy weeds…. all lined up in a nice row. I had weeded my way around to the bed where I planted pieces of potato about a month ago. Potatoes should come up within about 10 days, so by this point, I had given up hope.

 I followed some YouTube directions on how to plant potatoes, but as with the rest of this gardening experiment, I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing. I cut the seed potatoes into chunks with at least two eyes per chunk and let them dry or “cure” for a few days to avoid the risk of rot once put into the ground. Then I planted the potato chunks about 3-4 inches down in acidic soil with a good amount of compost or manure. Once the plant comes up and begins to grow, the potatoes can push up out of the soil which is no good. Sun-burned potatoes turn green and are inedible. Hilling is the act of adding 2-3 inches of soil to the row to protect the potatoes from the sun.

Another handy tip – potatoes should be harvested 2-3 weeks after the actual plant dies. Which is good to know, because otherwise how are you supposed to know what’s going on down there…

hay for stabilization, weed control and moisture

heirloom tomato riesentraube variety

feeder lines across a raised bed of potatoes

drip irrigation trunk line connected to smaller feeder lines

hose bib connected to a water timer and drip irrigation line

my little helper...sometimes

A Lesson Learned the Hard Way

Alright fine, Mother Nature. You win.

I learned a tough lesson the hard way. Despite that fact that I’ve been sweating my tush off at the garden for the entire month of February, Mother Nature decided to send one more little cold front through. How fun.

The frost-free date for Tallahassee is March 15, but the weather had been so sunny and beautiful, I didn’t think there was any chance we would get a freeze. Well, the joke was on me. Temps dropped the night of March 11^th and as luck would have it, I was out of town. I returned to some pretty peaked plants.

By this point, my garden has expanded to include Tendergreen bush beans, Red Pontiac potatoes, cucumbers, five varieties of heirloom tomatoes, basil, cilantro, Cali peppers, jalapenos & eggplant. The frost caused the cucumber leaves to turn white, the bush beans to wilt and some of the tomato leaves to shrivel. I picked the dead leaves of the plants and started a new batch of cucumber seeds. Cukes germinate quickly, so if the first lot officially dies off, I’ll plant the new ones.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed for the tomato plants.

Hot Mess of Seeds

Alright - lesson learned. Don’t buy a gaggle of gardening books and then selectively choose the advice you WANT to follow. I flat out ignored the step in seed germination where you thin out the weaker seedlings to allow room for the healthier ones to grow and as it turns out, there’s a pretty good reason for including this step. When it came time to plant the lettuce and carrot seedlings in the ground they were a hot mess. The roots had grown together, the leaves were all tangled and it was impossible to separate a seedling without damaging the whole lot. I wondered if this was an amateur mistake or the makings of a greedy gardener. Of course I want ALL my lettuce plants to grow. What exactly will I do with 36 heads of lettuce at one time? I’m not quite sure…but I grew these little seedlings and want all of them to be successful. I also passed statistics and playing the odds is the way to go here, but how do I plant this snarl of seedlings?  

Enter Hippie Jeremy. Jeremy is one of the professional gardeners tending to the Orchard Pond Organic crops. Maybe I didn’t explain that very well in the beginning, but the majority of the community garden is used by Orchard Pond Organics to grow vegetables for their CSA members (http://www.orchardpondorganics.com/). CSA or Community Supported Agriculture and is a service that provides local fruits/vegetables to members for a set monthly fee. Jeremy suggested I separate the seedlings the best I can and prune back the clumps as they grow up. I confirmed this technique with my Garden Guru, Sarah Marie - a certified Master Gardener who has successfully planted a prolific vegetable garden for many years.  Below are a few pictures of the lettuce and carrot seeds in the ground.

carrot seedlings in the ground (a little late, but we'll see what happens)

rows of lettuce starts next to drip irrigation lines