August 1, 2013

Potatoes harvested this morning

The original potatoes that these potatoes grew from had started to sprout this spring. Rather than throwing them into the compost heap, I planted them at Nottoway. This is the second year in a row I have managed to salvage potatoes from death row.

  It is lots of fun digging up potatoes; as Anne Marie said its like an Easter egg hunt with potatoes. When I dig up potatoes, I always feel as if there are lots of little potatoes lurking under ground that I missed. I think I need to "Hill" the potatoes so that they are easier to find. Next year!

I spent about two hours at Nottoway this morning. I cleaned up some of the beds by harvesting the potatoes and onions.

 After cleaning up some of the beds, I transplanted some Stella D'Oro lilies from home to the outside corner of the  Nottoway garden. At home, as soon as the Stella D'Oros bloom, the deer chow down on the flowers. Am tired of feeding the deer. I also transplanted some coneflowers from home. The walk I took with Anne Marie on Tuesday made me feel like a "Martha" -all work and no fun- because I realized I didn't have one flowering plant in the garden. So today, I added some plants that should provide some pink and yellow to the plot. I put them on the outside perimeter so people could enjoy them.

I also planted some Kentucky Wonder green beans in the outside beds so they could use the fence and the sunflowers to climb. I also planted some red Giant radishes in three rows in the large bed on the left. They should be ready in thirty days so I guess I'll plant some more next Thursday, and the following Thursday etc so that I'll have radishes ready to harvest for the month of September. Also planted a  few giant sunflower seeds along the fence line. The package said it  flowers in 90 days which would be the end of  October. Hopefully, these seeds will be productive- I'd like to harvest the seeds for the birds this winter. The sunflowers I planted in the spring were all decapitated. A little mysterious that only one from the spring  actually set seeds.