Fall Update

The garden has performed amazingly well this year, considering how little time I have been able to dedicate to it. Over a dozen quarts of potatoes are safely put up in mason canning jars, as well as peas, butter beans, tomatoes, salsa  and pickled peppers. September has settled in and I have been harvesting and freezing fresh peas and okra for several weeks now. 

This year one of my main goals was to try several varieties of cow peas to see which one performed the best, and I am very pleased with the results. My fingers hurt from so much shelling, but I have put up many quarts and cooked several meals from the bounty already. Of the several heirloom varieties I tried, three came out the clear winners, and I have collected enough seeds to grow them as main crop rows next year. 

The winning varieties were: Red Zipper, Turkey Craw and the Colossus. 

While these three stood out for different reasons, the choice was based on the following criteria- yield, taste, insect resistance and lastly, ease of shelling and how well mannered the plants were in the garden. Some of the varieties were vine-like, sprawling all over the place making cultivation and garden maintenance difficult. The Holstein produced beautiful and good tasting peas, but precious few of them. The Red Zipper produced lots of long, easy to shell pods over an extended period. The Turkey Craw produced a smaller yield and smaller pea, but with exceptional taste. The Colossus was just a super fat pod that shelled with the greatest of ease and good flavor.

And then there is the okra... 
I have eaten so much fried okra this summer that I feel like I have been in heaven. And I have frozen more quart bags than I can count, all from about 20 plants, which are still producing madly now at over six feet tall.

The peanuts are doing very well and I am excited to see the total yield when I harvest them. Last weekend I planted Mustard Greens, Spinach, Kale, lettuce  and Collards for the fall crop and they are up and growing. Peppers are so abundant that I am giving away about a half bushel per week. 



  

A quick update from the farm- 

May has been an extremely busy month for the band, and that has limited my work time on the farm. The garden is planted and doing fairly well, in spite of a late frost that damaged some of my crops. Last Sunday I was able to replant the green beans and some peas which had been wiped out, but there are still some bald patches in the rows that survived. I imagine I will have to replant the corn too, not because of frost damage but it looks like there were issues with my planter. A couple of the rows are thick but most of them are very sporadic. I think the planter just got jammed up and didn't distribute the seeds properly. Everything else I had planted by hand and the density was fine. 

 I was pleased with the result of my efforts at keeping the potato bugs bugs at bay, they are bushy, green and healthy with minimal infestation. In fact, they are blooming and producing little spuds already. I have already harvested potatoes from the tubs I have back in the city and they are quite good. 

I still have to plant the scarlet runner beans and some pole butter beans, but for the most part planting is done. I also planted two long rows of peanuts and hopefully they will come up and produce. I have another plot about 20x70 feet set aside for corn which hopefully I will be able plant sometime in June.