Category: a day in this life

The green coming up on the Beauregard potato was so enthusiastic that I wished it was time to plant it.  But, it really isn’t time yet.  There’s a bunch more of cold weather coming.  So, I pinched off all the leaf clusters of any size and stuck them in a jar of water to let them root into slips.  There are a couple of tiny leaves on the piece of potato that has roots coming out of the bottom.

The Japanese sweet potato isn’t doing anything yet.

I need to decide where to plant these when the weather is warm enough.  I have put the sunchokes in the bed where I planted sweet potatoes last year.  My neighbor hacks or Roundups anything that comes through on her side of the fence. So, vines over there are a really bad idea.  And sweet potatoes do vine all over the place.  I may decide to take Chuck up  on his offer of a potato pot and put them on the deck.  It would make harvesting easier and the vines on the rails would be attractive.

So, half the sweet potato is sprouting and the other half is doing nothing.  I’m not completely surprised.

When we were at the co-op yesterday, I found another variety that interested me.  I didn’t see a varietal name, but the description was “purple skin with white flesh”.  Searching makes me think it is a Murasaki, which is a Japanese variety.

Yes, I’m trying to root that.

Sunday, Chuck cleared out the dead remains of the Fall garden.  The Arctic Vortex and the following cold have totally decimated our crops.  He replanted cabbage, kale and chard and planted new lettuce mix seeds that we got from the Sow True rack at Weaver Street Market.  He planted some pumpkin seeds in one of the covered beds as an experiment.

The garlic and carrots appear to be OK.  The turnips may be OK.  The beets look like they’re done in.

And, speaking of garlic, the German Red seems to be the least successful, here.  Only one bulb is  showing any green.  The other varieties look healthy, though still small.

I was given some sunchokes/Jerusalem artichokes by a friend and got some of those in the ground on January 17.  Since they are perennial, can be harvested all winter and get sweeter as they linger in the ground, I figured that there is no wrong time to put them in the dirt.

Lastly, I found a nice resource for seeds. It is a useful list of  230+ companies supplying heirloom / non-GMO / organic seeds.  http://www.off-grid.info/food-independence/heirloom-seed-suppliers.html