What’s happening in the garden this week: Sept. 8-14

You say potato, I say tomato. Enjoying the late summer harvest

Sep 13, 2024

Potatoes

Getting to the bottom of the potato tower.

In the second week of May, after a little bit of reading, I created a four-foot high, three-foot diameter circular tower out of metal stakes and chicken wire and planted potatoes in it. I had never grown potatoes before and decided to use this planting method to avoid taking up valuable space in the vegetable beds. I put down about four inches of potting soil at the bottom, a layer of straw on top of that and about a dozen seed potatoes, their eyes facing out, in a circle a couple inches from the wire. I added another layer of soil, another layer of straw and 12 or more potatoes positioned in the same way. I kept at it layer by layer until I planted one pound of Keuka Gold, one pound of Dark Red Nordland and one pound of French Fingerling potatoes. I mostly left the tower on its own for the entire summer.

This week, with the leaves and vines that had sprawled out of the chicken wire turning brown, I harvested the result. I rolled back the wire and began gently digging into the soil and straw with my hands and a trowel until I exposed the first Red Nordlands. They were beautiful, most slightly larger than a chicken egg, some larger than that. I pulled about 7-8 pounds out before I came to the Keuka Golds. Some of these were even larger in size, though there were fewer overall. Maybe three pounds in all. The Fingerlings were nowhere to be seen. I’m not sure what happened there. If I made any mistakes it might have been in the quality of the soil; I mixed some garden soil with the potting soil, but was running out of potting soil as I built up the pile. I perhaps should have opted for a fluffier overall mix that would have given the potatoes space to grow. I possibly also should have watered the tower more regularly, though I’m not sure about that. We had a decent amount of rain during the summer until the last few weeks. I’ll read more about potato growing before next year. Overall I’m judging this a successful first effort!

Tomatoes

I’ve harvested at least 30 additional pounds of tomatoes over the past week. Since mid-August, we’ve been eating tomatoes with almost every meal. We’ve made tomato sandwiches and tomato pies and had pasta with fresh tomato sauce. We’ve assembled plates of sliced tomatoes with red onion, with basil, with mozzarella. We sprinkled them with salt and drizzled them with olive oil. We had cucumber and tomato salads and sliced tomatoes with cottage cheese. And we shared them with neighbors. I’ll probably make a gazpacho, though the weather’s been a little cool for a soup I associate with warm summer days. Anyway, this week I roasted about 10 pounds of heirloom tomatoes and about 8 pounds of paste tomatoes in the oven for 3 hours at 300 degrees. After chopping the roasted tomatoes a bit with an immersion blender I filled eight pint-sized Ball jars with tomatoes and a quarter teaspoon of powdered citric acid to prevent the growth of bacteria, and immersed the jars in a pot of boiling water for 35 minutes to seal them. The tomatoes should be good for sauces, soups, chilis and stews for the coming year.

Water, water

We haven’t had rain of any significance for at least a couple weeks. Despite the cool nights (temperatures are dropping into the mid-40s) and sunny but cool days (low 70s), the garden seems dry so I’ve been watering the plants. I use either a watering wand at the end of the hose to direct water right at the base of some of the plants like the tomatoes, peppers and eggplants, or a sprinkler that I move from section to section for a couple hours. All I can say is after years of paying a water bill, it’s nice to have a well.