Thursday was a cleaning day in the garden. I pulled out the pea vines and the last of the beets (they really weren’t going to get any bigger) and turned over the beet and garlic beds to prepare them for fall planting. A childhood friend was visiting this week and when we were at the pea fence, she wondered why we weren’t picking the oversized snow peas.
I explained that I was leaving them so the poor snow pea plants would think they were able to have babies. I figure each plant is driven by one thing only: making and leaving seed. This is why they start over-producing if you keep picking the fruit. Shell peas don’t do this as much. They aren’t motivated, because you let their peas/seeds plump out fully before picking. But snow peas get grabbed up the second they’re an edible length. The poor vines start putting out tons of snow peas– as fast as they can– until they get giant in a day, pale and often misshapen. Anything to make peas. I feel for them and so just stop picking, even though a snow pea pod can be chopped and thrown in a stir fry long after it’s prime material.
from the bag of La Ratte
While I was out there, I got tempted to empty out two seriously underperforming potato bags as well. Proving, once again, that even a bad year for potatoes is a good year.
This year looks to be a very, very good year for potatoes out in the potato bed. The La Ratte potatoes have vined like crazy and the plants are just now starting to die back. The potato bags have not fared as well, except for the Elmer’s Blue. I planted four special varieties in bags this year that I purchased from Curzio Caravati of the Kenosha Potato Project. They have struggled in the bags with a variety of pests and some dry periods (inconsistent watering by the gardener), but all of them put out vines.
I emptied out two bags, one of the Cups pink variety of potatoes in a homemade bag and the other a larger blue bag that had some La Ratte tubers in it. And guess what– potatoes! Not a lot of potatoes, and yes, kinda small (the vines were dying but not completely died back; the photo above is from two weeks ago. I just was very curious to see if there was anything in there). When you think about the size and quantity of the potato seed I put in the bag (think the three tiniest potatoes above), even these paltry plants quadrupled their yield. In the case of the La Rattes, maybe eight-ten times the yield. If this is a glimpse of the future (i.e., late August), we’re going to have many, many potatoes.
I’m not sure about the potato bag experiment. We’ll see when all the potatoes are harvested. It is very nice to have that extended growing space. It is a pain to have to keep them watered. But, you know, potatoes!
I think what we’re going to discover is that after three years of amending the clay bed where I’ve been growing beans, potatoes and onions, rotating them back and forth, that large area is quite productive and probably all I need. I also think in the future I won’t pay the big bucks for fancy seed potatoes. They are, after all, potatoes.
Love it!