Category: Garden

Posts about gardening and related topics, such as canning and maybe other aspects of food preservation.

Post G24-005: Is it March already?

 

This is one of those old-guy, life-is-like-a-roll-of-toilet-paper posts.  About gardening, yet.

If you actually have things to do, just move along, there’s nothing here for you.

Today’s topics are ginger, spinach, tomatoes, and garlic.

 

1:  Ginger.  If you enjoy watching paint dry …

… you’ll love sprouting ginger.

I decided on a whim to try growing ginger this year.  Apparently, it can be done in Zone 7, you just have to start them in the winter and grow them as housplants until mid-summer.

On the plus side, yes, you can sprout grocery-store ginger root.  There’s mine, above.

On the down side, I planted this particular piece of root just shy of one month ago.

On the other plus side, the internet correctly warned me that this was a slow and piecemeal process.

This is interestingly unlike anything else I’ve ever grown.   Usually, you plant a bunch of fill-in-the-blank, and then, however long it takes them to sprout, you get a bunch of sprouted fill-in-the-blank.   All at the same time.  Not so with ginger.  Each piece of root proceeds according to its own timetable.

On the other down side, this means I have to run an electrical heat mat for months.  I’m only running this at six watts, by using a lamp dimmer in the circuit.  But it runs all the time, so that by the time these are done sprouting (say, three months total?), that’ll be about 13 KWH, or enough electricity to drive may be 65 miles.  That’s rounding error, in the grand scheme of things, I guess.  But I’d rather avoid it if I could.

In hindsight, I ought to have started these around New Year’s Day.  Or not at all.  But now that something has sprouted, I’m going to keep going.

2: Spinach.  What, I’m already late?

Source:  Clipart library.com

Yes, I yam.

My wife is particularly fond of fresh spinach.  But I’ve never had the least luck growing it.

Maybe that’s because I didn’t know what I was doing.  So this year, I actually read the directions.

Turns out, spinach seeds like being in the cold, wet ground.  Far more than I would have guessed.  You should sow spinach seeds four to eight weeks before your expected last frost of the spring.

Or, in my case, the eight week limit was a couple of weeks ago.  So today I planted a few short rows of spinach.  I’m sure this is vastly earlier than I have ever planted spinach in the past.  Maybe I’ll actually get a decent yield this year.

3:  Tomatoes.  No way that it’s time to start tomatoes now.  Is it?

Yep, sure is.  In Zone 7, it’s time to start short-season (a.k.a. cold-tolerant) tomatoes, indoors, if you grow them.  Varieties like 4th of July or Early Girl, and more exotic ones that promise to produce tomatoes in a hurry.

After trying out various approaches to growing tomatoes, I’ve now settled down to growing some short-season (cold-tolerant) ones, and some regular-season ones.  (I’ve given up on heat-tolerant or late-season tomatoes, because all of those that I have grown have tasted just like bland grocery-store tomatoes.)

Cold-tolerant or short-season tomatoes can go out in the garden as soon as all danger of frost is past.  They can tolerate the cool nights that we’re still having in early spring.  By contrast, regular-season tomatoes have to wait another month or so, beyond that, until the nights have warmed up.

Anyway, in my area, we’re now about six weeks before our nominal last frost date of April 22.  So it’s time to get my early-season tomato plants started, indoors.  A week or so to germinate, five weeks or so to grow, then out into the garden they will go.

I was more than happy with the short-season (cold-tolerant) tomatoes I planted the past couple of years, so this is just a re-run.  I just set up six starts each of:

  • Burpee’s 4th of July.
  • Glacier
  • Moskovitch.
  • Quedlinburger Furhe Libe

Transplanted into the garden on or about my last frost date (April 22), I find that the 4th of July is true to its name, and has consistently given me its first tomato on that date, plus or minus a week.  Glacier and Moskovitch come in a few days later.  But for a truly early tomato, Quedlinburger Furhe Libe takes the prize in my garden, consistently beating 4th of July by a week or so.

These all yield decent-tasting golf-ball-sized tomatoes.  They keep on yielding through the summer.  And the deer leave them alone, at least once the plants have a bit of size on them.  What’s not to like?

It’s hard to think about the 4th of July right now, when we’re still having freezing nights.  But there’s a solid and logical chain between starting those seeds today and eating tomatoes out of the garden in early summer.

Sometimes I wish the rest of my life had been that linear.

4:  Garlic:  The hazards of planning for failure.

And then there’s the garlic I planted last fall.

I’ve tried growing garlic in prior years.  I’ve never gotten much yield.  But then again, I never did it right.

Among the things I didn’t know were that you really shouldn’t use grocery-store garlic for planting.  That’s for two reasons.  First, it’s all “soft-neck” garlic, which is both bland and does not grow well in the hot and humid Virginia climate.  (Though it does keep well, which is why you find it in the industrial food chain.)  Instead, I want to grow hard-neck garlic, which I can’t get in the stores here, and has to be bought from a supplier of some sort.  Second, “culinary grade” garlic is the puny stuff.  They reserve the biggest heads, with the biggest cloves, to be “seed grade” garlic.  And it is well-documented that if you plant bigger cloves, you’ll harvest bigger heads of garlic.  Which is precisely why they save the big stuff for use as seed.

The final thing I didn’t know is that garlic may benefit from the addition of a modest amount of sulfur to your soil.  That’s covered in Post G23-067.

Last fall, I decided to do it correctly.  Just for a change.

I bought three varieties of seed-grade hard-neck garlic from Snickers Run Farm, a Northern Virginia garlic farm.  Their product was, by a longshot, the burliest heads of true garlic I’ve ever seen. (N.B, elephant garlic is not actually garlic.)  I added a modest amount of a sulfur-containing fertilizer (Espoma Holly Tone) to the soil, along with compost and mulch.  And I planted in the late fall, when it was already pretty cold, though in hindsight, I probably should have planted later.

By-the-book, start to finish.

Based on prior experience, I didn’t expect much. I figured half of them would survive. So … rational or not, I planted quite a lot of it.  (Plus, I had to buy quite a bit of seed garlic to justify the shipping cost, which didn’t exactly help temper my decision-making.)

I looked that bed over today, and my only thought was, what on earth was I thinking.  Because, as of today, I have a 32-square-foot bed chock-a-block with garlic plants that seem very happy to be here.

Based on various estimates of typical yield, this should give me somewhere around 8 pounds of garlic, if it all comes to fruition.  That, where the recommended planting is about one pound, per adult, per year.

Luckily, garlic goes great with tomatoes.  And, I suspect, will go with pretty much everything I’m going to cook from June onwards, this year.

Post G24-004: Advice on sheltering your bee hotel for the winter.

 

My advice:  Don’t shelter your bee hotel for the winter.  Let it freeze along with everything else.  This post explains why.

Early bee emergence

Last year, for the first time, I hung up a bee hotel.  This is a set of nesting tubes designed to make it easier for solitary/native bees, such as mason bees, to reproduce.  It seemed to be quite successful, per the picture below.  Ultimately I ended up with about 15 nesting tubes filled.

I left that up through the summer and fall, and, per common internet advice, moved it to a sheltered location once winter set in.  In this case, I moved it to the inside of a detached, totally unheated garage.

Moving a bee hotel to a sheltered location, for the winter, is probably not a good idea.  Despite that being widely suggested by seeming experts.  That’s because if your sheltered area is even a little warmer than the outdoors, I think it entices the bees to emerge too early.

That’s what appears to have happened this year.  For my particular Home Depot bee hotel, the nesting tubes that were filled by mason bees last spring …

… are all now empty.

Consistent with that, my wife noticed some bees on her crocuses this morning.  Which was odd enough to stand out.  Because, among other things, not much is blooming right now except crocus and daffodil.  And it’s not all that warm out yet.  The upshot is that it seems a little early to be seeing bees out and about.

I’m betting that those were “my” bees.  And I’m betting that I did them no favors by (inadvertently) waking them up too early, this year.  If I put up a bee hotel again this year, I’m just going to leave it alone.  I’m now of the opinion that  bees ought to overwinter at exactly the temperatures they’ll face out-of-doors.

Like Tinder, but with only 15 people using it.

Experts say that mason bees should emerge when blossoms are open, and daytime temperatures consistently reach 55F (reference).

By those benchmarks — blooms and temperature — my bees are at least three weeks too early. That’s based on these observations.

Blossoms:  Slim pickings.  At present, only the crocuses, daffodils, and maybe a scattered other few species blooming.  There are a few cherry trees here and there, in this area, in blossom.  For reference, the earliest recorded peak bloom date for the national cherry trees is March 15, with April 1 being a typical date (reference March 15 to the National Park Service).  Separately, a harbinger of spring in many areas is forsythia, but our forsythia isn’t even close to blooming yet.

Temperatures:  Still too cold.  We’ve had a couple of days where the high exceeded 55F, but those are still few and far between.  We are not consistently 55F and higher.  But we’re closing in on that.

Source:  Weather underground. 

And based on our historical weather averages, you wouldn’t expect consistent 55F and higher days for another two-three weeks or so.

Source:  Analysis of NOAA weather data for Dulles Airport (Sterling, VA).

All of that, plus my experience last year, tells me that my little batch of bees emerged the better part of a month too early.  Call it three weeks, minimum.

Finally, these bees don’t live very long.  They emerge, eat, mate, and die within a span of a few weeks.  They’re now out of sync with their species in general, and they’re going to be dead before the rest of the local mason bee population emerges.  So, if they all survive, their procreation will be as described in the section title.

Conclusion

I’m not a bee expert, but I’ve spent a lot of time observing the habits of bugs, since I took up gardening during the pandemic.  The one universal rule is that everything in the garden — plants and bugs alike — operates on temperature, and on degree-days.

By keeping this bee hotel in an unheated garage, I kept it warmer than the ambient outdoor temperatures.  I suspect that, one way or the other, this caused my bees to emerge earlier than is optimal, for their species.

If I do this again this year, I’m going to leave the bee hotel outside all winter.  The bee larvae may not much like the cold, but they need to stay in sync with outdoor temperatures, in order to emerge at the right time.

Source;  All the pictures for this post are from Gencraft.com AI, with the prompt of “a bee, wearing a stocking cap and scarf”.

Addendum:  To bee, or not.

Edit:  In the end, I gave it another go, doing it better this time, as explained in Post #G24-008.  This year, my bee hotels are ugly, but properly constructed (closed-ended tubes roughly 6″ long), as shown above.  Well over half the tubes are now filled, as of this writing (4/22/2024).  I’m just going to leave them be until its time to take them down and put them in an emergence box next spring.

Original post follows.

Am I going to put up bee hotel this year?  Not sure, but at this point, I’d say, no not.  Probably not going to put up another bee hotel this year.  For the following reasons.

First, these bees don’t pollinate my garden.  They’re out and about early in the year, and they are gone by the time my garden crops or flowers need pollination.  So when you hear about “attracting bees to your garden to get better yields”, they ain’t talking about mason bees.  The earliest-blossoming food I grow is peas, and my recollection is that mason bees do their thing well before (e.g.) the peas blossom.  Apparently they are good for orchards.  Which would make sense, as fruit trees blossom early.  (And mason bees are orchard bees, or orchard bees are mason bees, or something, I’m not entirely sure.  I don’t have an orchard.)

Second, I’m trying to grow the kinds of plants that (the internet tells me) make good natural nesting sites for these bees.  But that whole enterprise is looking a bit sketchy at the moment.  I’ve started down that path, by not mowing my wildflower beds yet.

You’d think, well, that’s got to be dead easy, just grow some plants and leave them. Just don’t mow.

But its not that simple.

Mason bees need medium-sized hollow stalks to nest in.  (Or equivalent.)  That seems right by my experience so far.  Sturdy annuals will sometimes leave behind big, ugly stems.  Looks about the right size.

But that’s the point where anything ceases to be easy.

In a nutshell, you have to keep them for two years, they’re ugly, they get in the way, and you have to defend them from the deer.  I’m not going to go through the details.  I can boil it down to this.

Do I really want to use my time and attention to try to protect some ugly weed stalks from ravenous end-of-winter marauding deer?  For a couple of years, yet (the literal same batch of stalks, I mean.)  And somehow work around them, while prepping the beds for this year’s flowers.  And in the end, really have no clue whether they are effective or not.

I have a lot of sunk cost in this whole bee-hotel thing, not in the sense of buying the Home Depot wooden bee hotel, but mostly in the time and effort gathering and cutting bamboo, in anticipation of annul replacement of the nesting tubes in that hotel.

In addition, rehabbing that Home Depot hotel for re-use could be a fair bit of work.  I should replace the bamboo nesting tubes each year.  This year — with the off-the-shelf unit — that means breaking the existing glued-in tubes out first.

I think I’ll see how hard the rehab is, first, then decide on next steps after that.

But as of right now, I’m not seeing a huge benefit to anybody or anything in being a mason bee hotel keeper for another year.  I should let them find their equilibrium vis-a-vis the local flora.  Might tweak the flora to try to help them out, if I can figure out how to do it.  But I think I’m going to punt on maintaining a manufactured bee hotel.

Post G24-003, addendum 2: Starting ginger root, second try.

 

 

The goal here is to force some ginger root.  To do that, you put the root in a warm, moist (micro) environment, and encourage it to sprout.  Typically, you do that warm-moist thing indoors, with a planting tray on a “seedling heat mat”.

On my first attempt, I ended up cooking my ginger roots.  Per just-prior post.  Soil temps approached 110F, in what I think was its thermal steady state.

This post is about my second attempt at sprouting ginger root. Continue reading Post G24-003, addendum 2: Starting ginger root, second try.

Post G24-003, addendum 1: Slow-roasted ginger root.

 

Yield:  Approximately one-half pound roasted ginger root.

Preparation time: Ten minutes.

Cook time:  Two weeks.

  • Purchase a few ounces of organic ginger root.
  • Wash and cut into bite-sized chunks.
  • Sprinkle with copious amounts of potting soil.
  • Water to taste.
  • Place on seedling heat mat.
  • Bake at ~110F for one to two weeks, or until shoots fail to develop.

Ready, Fire, Aim.

I started some ginger and turmeric plants about two weeks ago (Post G24-003).  This is the first time I’ve tried growing these.

For me, they fall into the same garden category as potatoes and sweet potatoes.  They  are roots/tubers that you start by sprouting indoors, before moving them out to the garden much later in the year.  The sole difference, really, is that these will need to spend several months as houseplants before going out into the garden.

The potatoes are doing fine — see prior post.

The sweet potatoes aren’t expected to start sprouting for another couple of months.

But ginger and turmeric sprouts are now conspicuous by their absence, nearly two weeks after planting. So I decided to see what was up.

Turns out, the cheap seed-starting heat mat I bought from Amazon last year was a bit too powerful for the task.  I thought it might warm the soil enough for to prod these into growth — maybe 80F or so, from my roughly 60F floor. Never bothered to check it.  I figured that, if anything, that cheap little mat wouldn’t cut it, and so this tray of soil might remain too cool for the ginger and turmeric to sprout.

But now I see that I have more-or-less cooked those roots, over the past two weeks.  What felt warm to the touch was actually around 110F where the roots sit.  Pretty sure that’s lethally warm.

Another twenty degrees and I can claim I was trying to compost them.

In hindsight, expecting that off-the-shelf heat mat to be just perfect, for this situation, was kind of dumb.

So it’s back to the grocery store for another few dollars’ worth of ginger and turmeric.

And off to rummage in the garage for some sort of lamp dimmer or similar, to allow me to control the temperature of these heat mats.  Pretty sure that anything that will control a small electrical resistance load will work.  That, and a thermometer, and I ought to be able to make this work.

 

Post G24-002, addendum 2. Chilling the chitting.

I’ve been chitting a batch of potatoes at room temperature for about ten days now.  About half have started to sprout vigorously.  About half have not.

This is mostly a function of potato variety.  I’d say more about that if I could, but these are from bags of grocery-store organic potatoes.  (Organic, to avoid potatoes sprayed with a potent sprout inhibitor.)  The grocery store is a cheap source for potatoes for planting, but a downside is that all I know about the varieties is “gold” and “red”. Because that’s what it said on the bags.

The early-sprouter is “gold”.  This may be a result of some Yukon Gold potato somewhere in its family tree.  Or it may be an actual Yukon Gold, for all I know.  (Yukon being a pretty good indication that the potato was marketed to growers with cold climates and short growing seasons.)

Or maybe none of the above.  The exact variety doesn’t matter.   What matters is that all of these potatoes end up chitting at about the same rate.  I want them all equally ready to be planted, at the same time.

Ideally, these will all be in the same sprouted state, a month from now, on St. Patrick’s day (March 17).  That’s the traditional day for planting potatoes and peas in this area (Zone 7).

I have to slow down the ones that have already sprouted, both to avoid the sprouts getting too big, and to let the others catch up.  The ones that haven’t really gotten started yet will remain at room temperature.  The ones that are well on their way are now in a box, to be placed in a cooler, non-freezing location, such as the garage.  The nights are still getting down into the 20’s F here, so I don’t think the sprouts will survive on my back porch.

This is all part of this year’s chit-versus-no-chit experiment.  A similar number of potatoes sits in the fridge, not sprouting, in a bag with “DO NOT EAT” written on it.  The fridge potatoes are destined to be the control group in this experiment.  Assuming all goes well, sometime in July I’ll see whether chitting made any (statistically) significant difference in potato yield.

Post G24-002, Addendum: Chitstistix, a power test.

 

Do I have sufficient statistical power to test the effect of potato chitting, in my back-yard garden?  Or is it laughable to think I might be able to learn anything whatsoever about the effect of chitting, from a single small-scale potato planting?

The upshot is in red below.  Chitting has to make quite a bit of difference, in order for it to show up in this small sample. Continue reading Post G24-002, Addendum: Chitstistix, a power test.

Post G24-003: Ginger and turmeric, edible house plants.

 

Above you see the start of some ginger and turmeric plants.  These are just a few ounces of off-the-shelf organic ginger and turmeric roots, from the grocery store, cut/broken into pieces, soaked for a bit, pressed into some damp potting mix, covered with more potting mix, then left on a 20-watt seed starting heat mat to sprout.

I ought to start seeing green sprouts emerge in a week or two.

I admit, these were an impulse item.  I was at the grocery store, getting some potatoes (for chitting) and sweet potatoes (to get going, for slips for planting), and I noticed the ginger root.  I’ve heard that it can be grown in my area (hardiness zone 7).  So I picked some up.  And if I’m doing ginger, I might as well do turmeric, as they are close relatives and have similar growing requirements.

My advice:  Before you start these plants, start with a little math.  My growing season is maybe 6 months long.  (The Old Farmer’s Almanac lists my growing season as 186 days (reference).  Most sources say that ginger requires a 10-month growing season.  So, one way or the other, absent a greenhouse, these are going to be houseplants for about four months. One way or the other. Before I can plant them out in the garden.

I haven’t quite worked out how I’m going to manage that.  But rumor has it that these will sprout in their own good time, so it’ll be a matter of some weeks before I’ll need to start dealing with that.  If they sprout at all.

I mean, how hard can it be, right? Plus, all that delicious turmeric ale.

Addendum:  Sweet potatoes

Finishing off my root/tuber/rhizome starts are my sweet potatoes.

I have sung the praises of the lowly sweet potato elsewhere (Post G23-065).  It’s food that can look after itself.  Once you get them started, you prune them to keep them from taking over. And dig up some food at the end of the season.

The only hard part is coaxing a handful of sweet potatoes to sprout, so that you can plant the sprouts.  And even that isn’t hard, it just seems to take forever.  Plop a few sweet potatoes into a box full of potting soil, keep it warm and moist, and wait.  And wait.  And wait.

So I start my sweet potatoes now — around Groundhog Day.  Which seems ridiculous, given that they really don’t want to go out into the garden before May 1 or so, at the earliest.  But it really does seem to take them months, every year, to begin producing slips.  So in they go.

Aside from remembering to water them every once in a while, this is zero effort.  You just have to remember to do it early enough, every year.

 

Post G24-002: The straight chit on growing potatoes.

 

This post is a classic example of why nobody consults this blog for gardening advice.

If you are a back-yard gardener, and are considering whether or not to grow potatoes, you want advice.   Directions.  You want somebody to say do this, do that.  Follow this approach and success is guaranteed.

But much internet-based advice for the home gardener is folklore.  Frequently repeated, never tested.  Certainly not tested by the folks who repeat it.  Such folklore is sometimes helpful, sometimes merely harmless, and sometimes dead wrong.

What I’m supposed to say in this post is something like “it’s time to chit potatoes now, before you plant them”.  That is, get them to break dormancy and sprout first, then plant the sprouted potatoes.  And then I’m supposed to explain how I go about doing that.

As if I were somehow privy to the innermost secrets of potato-chitting.

What I’m actually going to tell you is this:

  1. The evidence in favor of chitting potatoes is ambiguous.
  2. The recommended procedure for chitting potatoes is all over the map.
  3. Professional potato farms don’t chit their potatoes.

This year, I’m going to set up a little experiment to test the impact that chitting has, for my potatoes, here in Northern Virginia Zone 7.

But in this post, I’ll first explain how I go about growing potatoes in my back-yard garden.  I ignore almost all the rules on proper potato etiquette.  So it’s not clear what my advice is worth, anyway.  But unlike your average garden blogger, I’m up-front about that.

Free advice is worth what you pay for it.

Here’s what I do

Even though potatoes are cheap, I grow them for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it’s easy and effective.

Deer won’t eat them.  Neither, so far, will the bugs.  In a good year, they produce a lot of calories per square foot.  Within reason, you can harvest them whenever you’re ready.  They keep well.  They taste better than grocery-store potatoes.  And around here, they’re done by mid-summer, and you can double-crop with beans or some other short-season crop.  Last year, I planted late-season corn after my potatoes were done.

I start by buying organic potatoes from the grocery store.  Organic, to avoid buying potatoes sprayed with a potent sprouting inhibitor (Post G22-004).   From the grocery store, because I’m cheap, and it’s convenient, and so far, it works just fine.

There are some downsides to this.  You have no clue what your varieties are.  This year, mine are “red” and “gold”, per the picture above.  If you live in the South, don’t bother with russets, as they take too long to mature for this climate (Post #G23-035).  Other than knowing to avoid those, you have no idea if your grocery-store potatoes are early-season, mid-season, or main-season potatoes.  (In the South, you would like to avoid long-season (main-season) potatoes, because potatoes don’t like Southern summer heat.)  If you get a particularly good or bad crop, you can’t replicate the variety.  And so on.  Not to mention, no guarantee they are virus-free. 

OTOH, given that I can typically get potatoes at the grocery store for around 80 cents a pound, as the price of seed potatoes, with shipping, approaches $10/pound, if you do this “right”, you have to have a pretty good yield, just to get your money back.  It’s just a lot less stress to pick up a bag or two at the grocery store, than to obsess over which variety of ludicrously expensive seed potatoes to order.

 I chit them near a window, at room temperature, starting on or about Groundhog Day.   Just set them out, on a tray, and watch for sprouts to start. It’s less than totally decorative, but it’s close to no effort.  This in USDA Zone 7, so adjust accordingly for your climate.  This is roughly 10 weeks before the expected spring last frost date in this area.

See last section for discussion of chitting.

I plant on St. Patrick’s day, after cutting them into chunks the day before.  St. Patrick’s, because I can remember the date.  And because that’s about four weeks before our expected last frost date in the spring.  Planted in the cold of March 17, it takes about a month for the shoots to emerge from the ground, so that, ideally, you’ll see those potato shoots just after danger of frost has passed.

Dig a little trench 4″ or so deep, chuck in the potatoes, cover them up, toss a little mulch on top.  I aim for about a 1′ to 1.5′ spacing in all directions.  Conventional wisdom says that if you plant them further apart, you’ll get fewer, larger potatoes.  Makes sense, but I can’t say that I’ve tested that.  You’re also supposed to “hill” them after they have grown a bit — just mound up a little more dirt onto the potato stems.  Apparently the entire point of hilling is merely to keep the sun off the potatotes, so they do not form poisonous solanine (see Post G23-065, on why green potatoes can kill you, but green tomatoes won’t).  Anything sufficiently opaque — dirt or mulch — will do.

That long time lag between planting and sprouting is a good reason to chit.  If, somehow, your seed potatoes aren’t going to sprout, if you don’t chit, you’ll only find out about it a month or so after you planted them.  Eventually — call it six weeks later — it will dawn on you that you aren’t seeing any potato sprouts, and you need to re-plant.  Which, in the South, means you’ll end up trying to finish off your potatoes in the heat of summer, which is a bad idea.

I plant them in dirt.  I’ve tried no-dig potatoes using straw (worked great, but straw bales are too expensive in my area, Post #1073), and no-dig potatoes using leaf mulch (dismal failure, but hey, the leaf mulch is free in my area, Post G23-041).   Separately, for a variety of reasons, I’m not going to grow potatoes in containers.  So dirt it is.

Why mess around with no-dig potatoes?  Clay soil.  Potatoes don’t like the heavy clay soils in my area, so it takes a huge amount of soil amendments (or bringing in topsoil, which I did for my raised beds) to get dirt that potatoes will grow well in.  If you have clay soil, and want to try potatoes, do-dig is a lot less effort.  In addition, you can use a year of no-dig to convert some lawn to garden bed, if you bury it deeply enough in mulch.  Either way, in the right circumstances, no-dig is a way to reduce the total effort involved.  (Also, the potatoes come out nice and clean.) 

Why did no-dig potatoes in leaf mulch fail miserably, but no-dig potatoes in clean straw were a success?  In hindsight, I think that it allowed the potato tubers to get too hot.  I have since seen one excellent gardener (Self-Sufficient Me, on YouTube have a near-identical potato failure using no-dig in leaf mulch.  Upon reflection, I think that the dark, compacted leaf mulch, in full sun, allows the potato tubers to get too hot, leading to few potatoes set, small potatoes, and knobby potatoes.  Potatoes really do not like heat.  If I do no-digs again, I’ll keep the soil temperature in mind, and either use deep, light-colored mulch, or set up a shade cloth over them.

Separately, regarding fertilizing potatoes, I dump enough leaves on the garden each year that I don’t have to worry about adequate soil nutrients such as nitrogen.  But potatoes, in particular, are supposed to benefit from adequate potassium in the soil.  It’s good for their skins.  (And, correspondingly, potatoes in the skin are a high-potassium food.)  It’s easy enough to test your soil for potassium with one of those $10 soil test kits from the hardware store, and if lacking, to spread minute amounts of potassium chemical fertilizers before you plant a potato bed.

Weed and water them, just like any other plant in the garden.

I pull off the flowers as they form.  This, because the internet tells me to do so.  This process aligns the potato plant’s chakras or something.  I have no clue whether it makes any difference or not.  Just FYI, potatoes have pretty white flowers.

I harvest them when the tops die back.  Or I want the garden space for something else.  Once they start laying lying down and looking straggly, that’s a good sign that they are done for the year, and can be dug up at my convenience.

Note, however, that potatoes do not like heat.  In a warm-summer climate like Virginia, those tops are going to die back sometime around mid-July, no matter whether the tubers underground are finished or not.  If I could pick my varieties, I’d grow early-season (short-season) potatoes.  But given that I grow mine from grocery-store potatoes, … whatever happens, happens.

If I’m lucky, I’ll come in at the low end of the yields posted above.  Not sure if it’s the climate, the soil, the gardener, or the lack of care.  Just be aware that a lot of the miracle yield claims you’ll see on the internet are complete, total, and intentionally misleading bullshit.  When in doubt, check with your local extension service to see what you can reasonably expect in your area.

Addendum:  This year, a small controlled trial of chitting.

Why chit?  Conventional wisdom says this will lengthen your growing season by perhaps a week or two (reference, University of Utah).  I.e., put you a week or two head of the game, compared to planting without chitting.  In the South, that’s a good thing, as potatoes don’t like heat, and they are going to die off in the heat of mid-summer, ready or not.  Plausibly, you’ll get an extra week of growth before the heat kills off your potatoes, and that should translate into higher yield.

But, as with so much advice for the home gardener, everybody repeats this, and seemingly nobody tests it.  There’s surprisingly little hard evidence on the benefits of chitting potatoes, and what evidence there is is mixed (per the Guardian newspaper).

If you search the internet, you’ll see disagreement on almost every aspect of chitting.  The only thing I’m sure of is that it’s optional, because commercial growers don’t chit them.  But seemingly experienced gardeners disagree on:

  • Whether chitting makes any difference in yield, and if so, how much.
  • Whether it makes more difference to early-season (short-time-to-harvest) or main-season (long-time-to-harvest) potatoes.
  • Whether the potatoes should be kept cold or allowed to warm when being chitted.
  • Whether chitting should be done in the light, or in the dark.
  • Whether bags of commercial seed potatoes will “chit themselves”, that is, grow long fragile sprouts regardless (so that bringing them into the light, to produce short green sprouts, is preferred).

As a one-time professional user of vague, observational data, to me, this signals that the benefits of chitting, if any, are probably modest.  If chitting had some huge benefit, people would have noticed.

In fact, I’d say there’s a case to be made that “chitting” was invented as a way to control the inevitable sprouting of potatoes in some climates, absent climate-controlled spaces.  You’d bring your potatoes out of the root cellar, into the light, to green up the sprouts and control the rate of sprouting, so that they’d still be viable when planting time finally came around.

So this year, I’m going do to a little experiment. I’m taking half of each bag of potatoes, pictured above, and chitting them.  And leaving the other half in the fridge for the next six weeks.  This, now done, via the classic one-potato, two-potato randomization.

I then weighed the two randomly-assigned samples, and used a coin flip to determine which was to be chitted, and which was to be stored cold for the next six weeks.

I’ll be planting the chitted and un-chitted spuds, in more-or-less similar plots, on St. Patrick’s day this year.  I’ll track their progress and, absent catastrophe, will weigh the final yield sometime mid-summer.

I realize there’s a lot of potential for random variation in this, despite my best effort to draw from the same batch of potatoes, randomize, and then plant as nearly identically as possible.  I nevertheless think this can be informative.  If, at the end of the season, I can barely tell the difference between the chitted and unchitted spuds, then I think that’s a pretty good clue that chitting has a relatively modest impact on yields.  At least, in my climate, my garden, with my spuds, this year.

So, the null hypothesis is that chitting makes no difference.  I’ll see if I can plausibly reject that.  Expect results sometime around the 4th of July.

 

Post #1938: Psychrophilic bacteria for winter composting, total failure

 

This is a quick followup to post #1921, where I dumped some winter pond maintenance bacteria into one side of my tumbling composter, to see what would happen.  The question was whether or not that would keep my composter working in the cold of winter.

Now, one month later, the short answer is, not.  There is no detectable difference in the level of (un-decomposed) compost, between the treated and un-treated sides.

The upshot is that the only way I’m going to be able to keep that composter working throughout the winter is to heat it.  A little passive-solar-heated shed didn’t do the trick.  These cold-loving bacteria didn’t do the trick.  And having an electrically-heated outdoor composter is a total non-starter, for me.

At this point, I give up.  I just won’t compost kitchen scraps over the winter.