This past weekend, I dug up one-half of the remaining 1/8th of my potatoes down South.
I am putting the reason for mostly small, to me, egg to tennis ball size potatoes to A: mostly carry overs from last year, B: Variety of carry over, C: It is on the East side of the garden which Dad always said was damned poor for potatoes.
Now the the crop , from years I have put it there, is best I have had.
As I add three inches of years old mulch two years ago,and some old chem. fertilizer, that seems to have made a difference or maybe it was just this year, in which you had to have been cursed ,up here, to have a bad garden.
I was surprised those planted in the old rose garden were no better than those in the forbidden zone.
When I do the last few plants still there, I will have a approx. a bushel and one-half, which is partly due to small size as if they were the size I usually get I would have at least one and one-half bushels already.
I started to clean out my North garden weeks earlier than normal as the extremely healthy chiles were shading out the potatoes, squash, some tomatoes and actually anything behind the berm .
Sharon said: Why did you plant so damned may peppers?
I told her it was the number I had last year; it is just this year they went bonzo.
Although she is correct as during a normal mediocre crop, I still had more than we could use and we have frozen chile base in the freezer three-four years old.
Squash , vines, went as wild as chiles, they covered and killed the Purple Peruvian Potato vines,( which were still going nuts down South where they volunteered in the empty part of the rose garden, so I cut most of the vines off so the SOBs die.) but as they are so thick I do not want to do more than trim the endsm so squash started can fill out, much less dig the potatoes under the vines ; as it looks I have far more vine than squash.
Getting curious why my potatoes planted one week before those planted down South were still green and some flowering, I did go out and start gather the vines together so I could see just how many plants I had.
I discovered and one row had covered the the outermost row, of which, the vines were already dead.
I have to check which variety was in that row, white or maybe yellow but three of the five plants did very well.
A dozen, or more, potatoes , sizes between baseball and jumbo chicken egg on those.
On the other two there were three and four, baseball sized potatoes.
After I dig the first shovel out, I dig, literally by hand (on this side of the garden up North, it is easy to do as the soil, especially as deep as I plant is easy to dig in) now I am very glad I do that.
After getting out the the first four or five, I dig with my had to see if there are more and found, A: I planted these REALLY deep, and B: the majority were way down low.
It is nice that on this side of the garden the soil is still most like sandy clay it was twenty years ago, as the potatoes are easy to clean off.
I am now debating as whether or not to cut the remaining vines to speed of die off.
