The Patchwork Kitchen Garden: The Thirteenth Week
“There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.” -Alfred Austin
Well this week has been an interesting week. Just when you think you know what’s happening life of course throws you a curveball. Buckle up it’s been a bit of a bumpy week!
My potatoes that have been growing the grow bags died back and they died back rather quickly, so quickly in fact that it was time to harvest them. Once I had a relatively dry and hot day, I took my grow bags with the Huckleberry Gold and French Fingerling potatoes very hopefully of a nice harvest. I got a cardboard box and dumped all the contents out of my Huckleberry Gold grow bag. Now the dirt was pretty packed since it was all potted back in March, so I gently broke up the dirt with my hands to reveal my very first Huckleberry Gold. It was absolutely beautiful with an incredibly rich violet skin. In total I was able to uncover nineteen glorious spuds to cure in my garage and a small handful of micro potatoes that I decided to keep fresh for home fries. Not too bad for planting four seed potatoes in a grow bag, especially since I didn’t know what to expect with using a bag for potatoes. I was positively ecstatic and couldn’t wait to unearth my French Fingerlings.
My excitement was soon met with devastation, there wasn't a single usable fingerling potato in the entire grow bag. I honestly don’t know where I went wrong but I have a slight suspicion it may be the fertilizer. The plant got so big and luscious so it really was a surprise that these potatoes were not a success. I’m just going to have to read up on potato growth and see what exactly went wrong. It’s definitely a humbling situation but it’s also something I could learn from. That’s the thing about gardening no matter how long you’ve been honing the skill there’s always something new to learn. However, I am little worried about the last set of potatoes in my vegetable beds. However, I keep trying to tell myself they’re in the ground, they’re different potatoes, etc. But that doesn’t stop me from worrying and I’m about a half week before I harvest them, I’m just going to have to wait and see.
The difficulties in the garden unfortunately doesn’t stop with the French Fingerlings. This past week I’ve also been dealing with very unruly plants. Due to the various thunder and rainstorms, my plants have tripled in size and all my tomatoes are no longer cute little plants but a tomato jungle. The plants are towering over the cages and some were even so heavy that they fell over, knocking down the cage. To put it lightly, it was an absolute mess. I had to untangle some of my heirloom tomato plants and even tie them to try to create a trellis of sorts. It no longer looks very pretty but it’s doing the job and supporting my goliath plants, hopefully it stays that way and I keep the plants from destroying themselves.
But on the bright side I have a lot coming in to hopefully harvest in a few weeks. I got plenty of little tomatoes, peppers, herbs and don’t get me started with the cucumbers. I was able to pick two cucumbers this week and I have many more plumping on the vine as we speak. It would be nice if this time next week I can make a jar of pickles since I ate the first two fresh, they were very delicious by the way.
I actually had to harvest a good portion of my sage this week as well. It was becoming a little overgrown and desperately needed it. So I trimmed it up and hung about half my sage so it could dry for my pantry. The fresh sage smells so amazing and my entire kitchen is perfumed with it’s beautiful scent. I feel that I will probably have to dry some of my fresh basil and peppermint as well. May be I’ll even make a little peppermint extract for Christmas cookies, yes I have that much peppermint. The more I cut off for fresh peppermint tea, the more it seems to grow. It may seem like a bit of a problem but it’s a wonderful problem to have.
Like I said it’s been a very tiring and busy week. I unfortunately don’t have any more energy to share every little detail about the week. So I’m going to have to end it here and get back to my garden. Hopefully next week I’ll have a lot more good news to share to combat this challenging week.
To check out the garden in its entirety please look at the gallery below. Until next week, Happy Gardening!
