Transition

May is the true beginning of summer for us. April teases us every year with a week of 90 degree weather, but it has chilly nights more often than not. In May, the warm weather begins in earnest, and any rain we get will be a huge bonus. I hear a little voice in my head saying 'hurry! hurry!' even though my body says it's too warm and it wants a nap.

Yep, it's truly time to tear out the remains of the winter garden and get the summer crops in.

Blackberry blossom

Blackberry blossom

Cue the whirlwind of activity. My wheelbarrow was in heavy rotation this weekend, not to mention my trusty shovel and rake.

Luckily we had transplanted all the tomatoes and peppers last weekend, a huge job. So this weekend I focused on seeding corn, basil, sunflowers, watermelon, cantaloupe, collards, orach, edamame, and pole beans. Sometime this week I need to get the cucumbers in the ground; I just ran out of time. Besides, there's so much spinach left in that bed, and I want to eat as much of it as we can before I pull it out.

One of my new lavenders blooming

One of my new lavenders blooming

I added bars to the bee hive because the bees are going crazy with the spring nectar flow and I don't want them to run out of room. I transplanted fennel (I've never tried that before, we'll see if it takes) and noticed that the rhubarb is coming up.

Visions of rhubarb and strawberry pie dancing in my head...

Visions of rhubarb and strawberry pie dancing in my head...

I also ate my first blueberry off one of our bushes. SO SWEET.

Tom went to the farmers market and bought five more pounds of organic strawberries, since in our yard we never have more than a handful to eat at any one time. He made more jam. I've already given away 8 of the jars he made two weeks ago (teacher appreciation!). We're also eating it every day on toast. Homemade toast from our home baked sourdough, which also had to be made this weekend.

Poppy seedpods

Poppy seedpods

The pump in our ten-year-old water feature died, so Tom also spent a good deal of time digging the whole operation out, cleaning everything, making several trips to the hardware store, etc. As he was siphoning out the old water to the asparagus patch, a goldfinch came by to drink from the hose. The birds miss their bubbler. Tomorrow we can fill it back up. Ten years is a long time for a rinky-dink pump, so I'd say we got lucky not having to do it before now.

Ceanothus x pallidus 'Marie Simon', about to bloom

Ceanothus x pallidus 'Marie Simon', about to bloom

I saw some interesting things in the garden as I was working. Check this guy out:

This is a damselfly, probably a male, of the genus American Bluet. Isn't it gorgeous? He was maybe two inches long, quite small, perching on some sage (salvia clevelandii). These guys like water, so I'm not sure what he was doing in our yard. We do have creeks fairly close by, so maybe he just took a detour.

The California Carpenter bees are out in full force, with their huge, loud, 747-like buzzing.

on a Clarkia blossom

on a Clarkia blossom

I also saw that we have one small cherry. One! Wonder if we can get to it before the birds or squirrels. I'm going to have to be wily.

The hops are growing about six inches a day. I took this picture so you can see how tall they are getting. We need the shade over our patio table, so it's good that they're growing quickly. The trick is to water them nearly every day; I didn't realize how thirsty they'd be. Sorry for the mess in this picture, but it was a busy weekend. At least you know I'm not staging things for you. 

Up the rope trellises they go

Up the rope trellises they go

Hops are interesting in that they are not a vine, but a bine. There's a difference. A vine, such as clematis, will send out tendrils to curl around whatever they are climbing on. A bine, like hops, will just wind itself around the climbing material.

Time-lapse video would be interesting here

Time-lapse video would be interesting here

So - summer. Phew. And even if you're in an extreme Northern climate, it's spring now for you, so we're all busy. I'm guessing your shoulders ache like mine tonight, and your hands have wheelbarrow callouses too. Pretty much bliss, right? Happy planting!

Unexpected Potatoes

Last November, I planted an 8-foot row of red potatoes and an 8-foot row of yellow fingerling potatoes. They started off brilliantly, managed to keep growing over our frosty winter (with cover), and started growing in earnest in late winter/early spring. I decided to hill with straw, so I diligently added that as the plants grew.

Then the bugs arrived. I'm not sure what kind of bugs, but they seemed to be especially attracted to the red potato row while the fingerling row managed ok. Neither row has ever bloomed or gotten above about 2 feet tall, and the red row in particular was looking pretty grim. The leaves were nearly all gone, eaten by something - I suspect those darn earwigs. I was rueing my choice of hilling with straw, because I figured it was creating a nice little habitat for those earwigs and there was really nothing I could do but stand by and watch the plants totally disappear. 

So today, when I had a free hour, first I cleared out the cabbage bed in the South Garden as I had planned. I took some of the leaves to the chickens and put the rest in my freshly cleared out compost bin. As I did so, I was thinking about how putting that much green (nitrogen) in the compost was probably a bad idea without some brown (carbon) as well. As the compost bin is quite near the potatoes, my eye fell on the desperate red potato row, and with a sigh, I thought I'd clear out the straw and add it to the cabbage leaves in the compost bin. 

So I kneeled and started pulling up the hay. And guess what I saw soon after.

My mind couldn't process it at first. But it didn't take long before I needed a basket for the harvest. And after the entire bug-eaten row was cleared, I had about 10 pounds of potatoes.

What the heck? It just doesn't make sense. How can a plant produce fruit (or in this case, tubers) if it never blooms? I don't get it. But I'm not complaining.

This is my first hilling experiment, as I've always grown potatoes in towers before this, and I'd say the yield is about the same. I never grow an abundance because we really don't have the proper place to store them long term. I only grow as many as we can eat in a month or so.

I rinsed them, dried them, and put them in our mesh cloth bags to hang on the canning shelf, out of the light, and hopefully humid enough to cure properly. But if they don't, it won't matter, because we'll eat them up soon enough. I'm dreaming of hash browns with our fresh eggs and roasted potatoes with rosemary chicken.

I left the fingerling row in place. The plants look robust-ish (although will the earwigs now move over there???), and they'll keep better in the ground anyway until we're ready for them. Which won't be long, as I want to start the corn soon.

Happy Day! An unexpected potato day.