The spud report...

It was a gorgeous day here for gardening, clearing off some plants, and digging spuds.  I'm only digging what I need until it looks like we're going to get a deep freeze.  Starting tomorrow we are expecting a snow-rain mix.  Yup.  It goes from sunbathing weather of  82* and sunshine to high winds, cold 43* temps for highs and slush.  We'll take it!

Do you remember back when I told you about my new gardening experiment?  The No-Dig Potatoes?  Well, since the growing season is drawing to a close, I thought you might like a spud report.  So far I have dug maybe a sixth of the garden up so there's a lot more left to uncover, but so far the potatoes are really lovely, clean, and a nice size.  Most of the spuds are what I'd call average size and I'm getting about 5-6 average sized potatoes per plant.  Some plants have a few bigger potatoes and some have smaller ones, but I'm really happy with how this experiment has turned out and I definitely will do this again next year.

 This was one of the driest years on record here so I think if we would have gotten just a wee bit of rain from the heavens, the potato crop might have been even better, but who knows?  Check out the itty bitty potatoes left on the root of this plant (above).  Imagine if they could have all become nice, bug spuds!  I pulled some average sized spuds off this plant, but was amazed by the amount of "babies" the could have grown up to big Mr. Potato Heads!

I pulled out the rest of the jalapeno peppers and dug a few carrots and picked the last of the cucumbers.  The stuff that grows underground I usually leave as long as possible and pull up only what I need until the snow flies and the ground freezes hard.  Keeping things underground helps the potatoes toughen up their skins and the carrots just grow sweeter.

This evening in the dark, Hubs and I yanked up the tomato vines and pulled off all the unripened tomatoes.  We put them on a tarp and both of us carried them into the garage.  Hubs thinks we have about 75 pounds of tomatoes.  I think they'll ripen up in the garage as the days and weeks go by.  We also fetched in the pumpkins and the butternut squash from the patch.

Tomorrow morning I'll go snip all the parsley and dry it, and then I'll cut the calendula flowers and dry those too.  I'm planning to infuse the petals into oil for homemade healing ointments.  I didn't realize my flowers had healing powers until I started looking into making different salves.  I'm learning lots.

Guess what's going into the crock pot tomorrow?  Potatoes for Zuppa Tuscano Soup!  Can't wait.