Potato Time!

Well my Butte potatoes have been dying back, a few weeks earlier than I had expected. I am not sure if the die back is due to the heat or disease. Only a few of the plants seem to have really been damaged by insects, so I don't think they are the primary culprit.

In the end I have decided to go ahead and dig the potatoes. What I found has been a lot of small potatoes, with only a couple of the baking-sized potatoes that I had hoped for. It got dark before I could finish today, but I dug 15 pounds of potatoes--which seems in-line with what I would have expected for the amount of plants which I dug. This makes me think that the plants may have put on smaller tubers because the soil was pretty heavy around them--it may have just been too hard to push it out of the way to grow a large tuber.

When I finish digging up the row tomorrow or Saturday, I will be able to tally up my harvest to see how we did.

Canning starts...NOW!!!

So far green beans have been our most reliable crop here in Texas, so this year we planted a bunch. By a bunch I mean approximately 400 plants on two 40-foot rows. The beans are just starting to come on. We did our first real picking two days ago, and picked just over two pounds. We expected to have to wait a while for more, but yesterday we picked another two pounds, and I only expect the yield to increase as the plants get more into their bearing streak.

So, we will be busy canning. Last night I canned nine pints, with a full load being ten. I find that it takes just about half a pound of beans (before snapping off the ends) per pint, so if we get to the point that we are picking more than five pounds at a time we might be in trouble!

In other garden news, we harvested ten pounds of Reddale potatoes. If the rest of the plants have yielded about the same, then we should be digging up about another fifteen pounds soon, as the plants are really starting to die back now.

Fresh Potatoes for Dinner!

I have two types of potatoes planted in my garden this year, Reddale (a waxy red potato) and Butte (a russet baking potato). Due to my impatience I occasionally dig around under the plants just to see if anything is growing. The Reddales have been easy to find, but I had never been able to locate anything under my Butte plants.

I week or so ago I dug up my sickliest looking Reddale and harvested several potatoes from it (sorry, no pictures). Today I decided just to dig up one of the Butte plants to see what was underneath, and the picture shows what I found. To put it in perspective, this is a salad plate (9"?). The skin is mottled because they are still young and the skin rubs off if you scrub them at all. All in all I pulled out 1lb 11 oz of potatoes from that plant. Given that the portion of potato it grew from was probably no more than 2oz, that is a 13.5::1 ration of harvested potato to seed, not bad!

Like I said, these potatoes are still young. Left in the ground they would have continued to grow into much larger potatoes, for an even better yield. Lets hope the rest of the plants continue to do well and give us a huge pile of potatoes in a month or so.