maybe try a test of the soil! ~
2023 garden season
- Thread starter sonny580
- Start date
Help Support Arborist Forum:
taste is hard to beat! ~We’re still new at this. Mostly experimenting… I built a small greenhouse toward the end of last winter so my wife played with growing all sorts of starters. Most did well but some died after planting. The rest we bought in starter formtomatoes seem to be the best, crop wise. …Broccoli and Cauliflower did ok, cabbage…3 usable heads. Onions are doing well, garlic still too early to pull.we have about 200sqft of garden space on two levels.it is pretty cool to pull stuff out of the garden for dinner.
few yrs back, we had a bumper crop! still got a couple of qts left...
options and alternatives. i would not want to run a 5 hp Briggs on my TB Horse tiller! ~
been thinking i got too many tomatoes! but i cut some in half and put in refer. they dribble out some juice. i always spoon it out for a taste! it reminded me i never had too many tomatoes for fresh tomato juice!
Meatloaf tonight…3# of local farm beef and about the same in veggies from the gardentaste is hard to beat! ~
I use two Planet Jr push cultivators.
Here's my high arch and single wheel hoes. I don't know how old the high arch is but it works very well with the pictured sweeps.
I like and use them quite often.
jollygreengiant
ArboristSite Member
When you say that you only get gold ball sized potatoes, is that golf ball sized taters on a big bushy plant or on a small sickly looking plant?
jollygreengiant
ArboristSite Member
I finally took some pics of the garden after I have it a good weeding.
Things here don't look near as good as some of the other gardens posted on here. We were very dry earlier which made it a real struggle to get things to come up. I think the sweet corn took it the hardest. Now we have been too wet over the last couple weeks.
This was my haul last night.
New fruit beds this year. Bed in the foreground will be rhubarb, raspberries, and blackberries. The bed in the background will be blueberries once I get the soil ph adjusted.
Brassicas on the left, and melons in the middle. Peppers are in the middle of the melon patch as I ran out of room.
The potato patch. Row on the right is fingerlings planted a month earlier than the other two. Middle row is russets, left row is more fingerlings.
Sweet corn, with onions on the left.
And then tomatoes. Mostly paste tomatoes but also a couple cherry and couple slicing.
And the strawberry bed after I renovated it after harvest was done.
Things here don't look near as good as some of the other gardens posted on here. We were very dry earlier which made it a real struggle to get things to come up. I think the sweet corn took it the hardest. Now we have been too wet over the last couple weeks.
This was my haul last night.
New fruit beds this year. Bed in the foreground will be rhubarb, raspberries, and blackberries. The bed in the background will be blueberries once I get the soil ph adjusted.
Brassicas on the left, and melons in the middle. Peppers are in the middle of the melon patch as I ran out of room.
The potato patch. Row on the right is fingerlings planted a month earlier than the other two. Middle row is russets, left row is more fingerlings.
Sweet corn, with onions on the left.
And then tomatoes. Mostly paste tomatoes but also a couple cherry and couple slicing.
And the strawberry bed after I renovated it after harvest was done.
Couple Aleppo peppers on the top, next are the Hungarian Paprika, then the Black Magic Jalapeños. The light green jalapeño on the left is a Zapotec, picked a bit early, got three bushes that will be ready to harvest soon. Close up picture of the black magic to show the corking. I look for it on jalapeños as I have found from my experience that they will be hotter than the jalapeños without it.
Definitely not sickly, but not huge plants either.
USUALLY big plants give the biggest taters,---at least mine do. Smaller plants cant feed big tubers enough. Also takes a TON of fertilizer and thousands of gallons of water. Hill them up in wide tall mounds helps too as they dont like hard ground!
I usually have good luck with big taters. Soil around here is mostly clay. I usually use tripple 10 fert when planting. Once the taters are up, I will hit with 10/20/20 and cover the tops with dirt. I then like to fill the middle of the rows with mulch like old wood chips from my brothers horse barn. The chips hold in moisture and gives the taters something to grow into. Softball size taters are not unusual and many much larger as well. Contrary to popular belief, taters dont grow deep in the soil, instead they spread outward close to the surface. The mulch helps protect the taters from sunburn and also really helps with weeds.The old wood chip mulch is tilled under every year and has pretty much turned into soil by the next planting season.
jollygreengiant
ArboristSite Member
Good advice here. Taters need lots of fertilizer and water. But don't go too heavy with the N fertilizer or you will get very bushy plants. I mulch mine as well with straw, keeps the weeds down, moisture in the soil, and helps prevent taters from getting sunburnt.
I have been experimenting growing taters in buckets. For fert, I am buying 0/46/0 phosphate and 0/0/50 potassium sulfate in those little 2 or 3 lb bags. I mix a small handfull in the dirt. I fill the bucket about half full with soil, lay the taters on top and then cover with additional soil. When the taters are up, I throw in a handfull of 10/10/10 and fill the bucket almost to the top with more soil. Now I dont get a bushel of taters out of a 5 gal bucket, but I do get a large amount. I have found that just planting a couple or 3 chits in a bucket produces more, and bigger, taters than trying to crowd to many chits in the bucket. I have also found that drilling drain holes in the sides of the bucket, about 3-4 inches from the bottom, works better than drilling holes in the very bottom of the bucket. Buckets with holes in the bottm dry out way to fast, whereas the buckets with the hole in the side retain water at the bottom. This retained water will wick upward in the soil and keep the soil moist but not so wet as to rot the taters. This is still an experiment in progress, but am getting enough taters to keep me planting the buckets. I also dont have to weed the buckets and bugs are almost non exsistant.
there are many ways to grow taters and everybody has different ways depending on location/weather/etc. The sunburn problem is no problem here for me since I drag dirt up til I have mounds 3' wide at bottom and 1.5' to 2' at the top. This mound stays soft and they fill with spuds of nice size, if I can keep enough water hauled to them.
This year I only planted a couple short rows for our own use,--- no give-aways this time.
This year I only planted a couple short rows for our own use,--- no give-aways this time.
I use a garden hose for my buckets in the back yard. I have a 2inch trash pump I throw in the creek for my field taters. Of course this year water hasnt been a problem. Before I moved from my old place, it was to far to run hoses so I put a couple of 300gal totes on my trailer and would head to the creek and fill them up. I had those rainbird irrigation heads set up in the middle of the tater patch I would connect to the totes. I would fire up the pump and let it run untill all the water was gone. I would take me about 30 min to hook up the trailer and fill the totes. Unless I needed my truck for something else, I would leave it hooked to the trailer. Only thing that would have beeen easier would have been to have two pumps so I didnt have to keep loading and unloading the pump to hual water. Now that the field patch is close to the creek, all I need to tote is a gas can for the pump. Fill it, crank it, and let it run until the gas runs out. Two sprinkler heads will cover the whole garden.
I've got my sweet potatoes in the raised beds I made from a tote. Let see how well that works.
My beans are doing well. I picked my second gallon today and quit when the pail was full.
I don't have a pressure canner (just missed one on CL) and my freezer is full. I'll probably make room and just freeze them. Blanch first?
Still, I don't understand why you can't can them in a hot (boiling) water bath. Just extend the cook time from 20 minutes(?) to one hour. A 10 psig increase raises the boiling point to approximately 240 F which supposedly reduces the cook time to a third.
"Google" says you can't because of low acidity. Says you have to pickle them. I don't see what acidity has to do with it. Bacteria is killed at 170(?)F and longer processing time would be no big deal for 6 - 10 quarts.
I don't have a pressure canner (just missed one on CL) and my freezer is full. I'll probably make room and just freeze them. Blanch first?
Still, I don't understand why you can't can them in a hot (boiling) water bath. Just extend the cook time from 20 minutes(?) to one hour. A 10 psig increase raises the boiling point to approximately 240 F which supposedly reduces the cook time to a third.
"Google" says you can't because of low acidity. Says you have to pickle them. I don't see what acidity has to do with it. Bacteria is killed at 170(?)F and longer processing time would be no big deal for 6 - 10 quarts.
Go ahead and let us know how it works in 6 months. Me? I'm pressure canning them.
Similar threads
- Locked
- Sticky
