Weird And Wonderful, That’s Us!

Dave’s choice of a theme for this week’s header challenge is “Weird and Wonderful”. 

I’ve got the weird covered and Dirt always handles the wonderful part.

I’m a bit late again with my post, a sunny day and lots still to finish before the real cold weather sets in. Not to mention a bit of trouble with photos. But I’m here now!  Even after more issues with pictures and fonts.  Please, go see what the other players have for headers if you haven’t already.  Then prepare a trip down Tater Lane as you read on here! 

Bet took this week’s photos for the header on the new little camera she now wears on her belt all the time.  So “losing” our camera this summer was a bit of a good thing in the long run. She was an honorary member of the Header Challenge a little while back so I figured she could be the photographer this time as well.  She took ’em; I fixed ’em up.

That is most definitely a live dragonfly on my hat! I don’t have just any ornaments on my clothes, only the finest, natural and green, oh wait, it’s decidedly burnt sienna. It was there most of the day, out in the Market Garden, while I drove my tractor, worked in the hothouse.  Weird.

The dragonflies were intense this year blue, red, green, double winged (I’m sure not all of what I think are are dragonflies).  The red ones especially are still out on warm days.  We always have what seems like an awful lot of dragonflies here at the Farm but this year, even more so. And clearly acting a bit weird. 

Dirt, well Dirt is just plain wonderful.  Very helpful during harvest time, very encouraging and supportive about the Market Garden on and off the farm. 

Dirt has always loved harvesting potatoes with me. But he does bring the spade fork a long and uses it still, until he punctures two really nice looking potatoes, then he digs with his hand like I do.  No mechanical harvesting of the potatoes here!

We actually harvested one whole bed together the other day and didn’t’ say three words.  Not weird for Dirt, maybe, but definitely weird for me!  It has been a wonderful harvest of potatoes this year in spite of the ruined first plantings.

We planted four beds in mid July!  And still we managed to harvest well over three hundred pound of taters.  We even have some very big bakers!  Each of the harvest boxes hold between forty and fifty pounds.  This is off of one bed. 

I used fish bone meal for the first time this year, I’m thinkin’ it is wonderful stuff, a bit weird ‘cuz you can see bright blue fish scales in it, and clear shiny ones.  Very weird but wonderful results.  I will definitely be using it next year.  In fact I’m going to go up to the fertilizer distributor Thursday hopefully and get a bag along with some rock phosphate.  The rock phosphate I’ll add to the Market Garden beds now and the fish bone I’ll put in my window boxes with the spring flowering bulbs.

I learned a new thing not to do with potatoes this year.  As we were harvesting I was very bothered by these black flecks on the skins, like black tater zits.  And mostly on the russets we picked up from the Webster Road Feed, who gets them from Irish Eyes who deals only with certified seed potatoes (certified virus free not certified organic, there’s a difference.) So I knew that the original potatoes were clean, and this was bran’ spankin’ new dirt – new to garden cultivation, it shouldn’t have potato diseases in it.  Weird right?

I researched the flecks, and they are Black Scurf, weird name.  Its cause by a fungus but isn’t any big deal other than cosmetic as far as eating quality but who wants to eat taters with black flecks and do I wanna spend all my time explaining why my taters have flecks?  So on I read.

In one place I read that potatoes are more susceptible to black scurf if they are planted too deeply.  And that they were.  Especially the bed that had the most scurf.  They had very long sprouts on them, if you’ve read other post on taters here you know sprouts on seed taters are a good thing,  but shorter is better.  These taters had super long ones, because they had begun to sprout in the dark.  Keeping taters in the dark is important but once you start chitting them (sprouting them) they need to be in the light so the spouts stay short not long and spindly.

When Bet and I planted these we started out laying the potatoes down and letting the long sprouts just lay sprawled on the surface as we put about four inches of soil on the whole surface of the bed.  By the last bed and a half I just felt the need for the sprout to be up right so I talked Bet into making holes in the bed, putting the taters in and covering the works with the soil from the pathways, resulting in very deep potatoes.  It seemed to work great,  the potato plants sized up quick and were healthy for the rest of summer.  Everything was great until we dug the potatoes.

Now I have scurf, black scurf, and I don’t want it again.  So yes, we won’t be using any of these potatoes for seed.  We will continue to practice crop rotation but scurf lives a long time in soil.  It’s a fungus called Rhizoctonia solani.  We won’t be planting them deeply to accommodate long sprouts.

It doesn’t sound like there is any easy way to reduce the incidence various practices and planned planting times.  There was a group that experimented with planting mustards as a green manure crop just prior to the potatoes. It appears to help.

That’s wonderful!  Very easy for here, mustards can grow nearly year round.  The article talked about allowing them to flower and after this year I’m thinking of planting taters later than March.  So a quick cover of mustard before planting will be very doable.  I’ll just need to make some minor adjustments in the planting plan.

Look!  Potato Bird!  Did I mention that we harvested over three hundred pounds?  Need some taters?

Hey look if I turn Potato Bird I get Potato Mitten.

I can flip it around and get the other hand.

Better yet, I can put the two together for a pair, dedicated to my snowy friend Far Side!  Have a great weird and wonderful day today Dear Reader.  And thank a veteran tomorrow. or several. or all of them.