Before we left Wisconsin on Sunday morning, I harvested all of our potatoes. It was a sad crop. I sometimes get very discouraged when gardening as our home garden in Chicago is more and more shaded by our neighbor's huge Silver Maple so my tomatoes, beets, beans, chard, etc are fairly scraggly. Our Wisconsin garden is so overgrown with weeds since we are only there every two to four weeks that the weeds are often taller than the tomatoes! Anyway, while harvesting my potato crop - that I was never able to hill appropriately, I became discouraged by these attempts to grow our own food. Bill, being a great partner, said 'just think how much you will be able to grow when you actually have sun AND live in the place you grow your food. If you can grow these potatoes and tomatoes and greens without trying - just think of how much you will yield when you are actually able to tend on a regular basis and you have full sun!' It did make me feel better. I did get about 10# of potatoes.
We both worked in the garden for about 3 hours on Sunday morning. I dug up the aforementioned potatoes and planted buckwheat as cover crop on the bare beds. Bill restrung the tomatoes. We think we will end up getting a fair number of tomatoes. I brought a lot of green ones home. Our neighbors' tomatoes are all dying. Ours look fine. hmmmm.... perhaps over fertilizing is the culprit? My grandma's tomatoes also always died early but she loved Miracle Gro and never rotated her locations.
I also found out that our neighbors have hens - I didn't get over to see them, but I will when we are back up over Labor Day.
Last night for supper we had steamed fresh edamame pods. I got them from a farmer coop that delivers to my food coop. They were delicious!
A journal of our adventures in construction, garlic farming and growing our own food as we transition from life in Chicago to life in Southwestern Wisconsin.
3 comments:
I love edamame! We never got a chance to grow them this year--but I s'pose it's just as well given our bean plant issues.
Congrats on the potatoes. That's enough to completely count it as a success! Wilt and Japanese Stiltgrass (worst weed ever) conquered ours--we only brought in about 20 small ones, and haven't figured out how to cook them yet---do you have a favorite way? How are you planning to store them?
As for gardening and veggie yield, I would say that's a pretty good yield for only being able to tend to it every few weeks! It's all in how you spin things :-)
Hi Sparow,
We steam it. I only received a pound so we've eaten almost all of it. I should have gotten more and experimented with freezing it. After all, the grocery stores sell it frozen, I wonder if it would work.
I have been harvesting some of our potatoes the last couple of times up there. We have weeds like yours :-). I planted a lot of them so we should be okay. About 2 medium size a & couple small ones from each plant so far. Don't get discouraged. We do what we can do, right?
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