I have been doing some major fall work in the North garden.
Lady Bug time, and I got bitten by one of the native varieties and a lot of the foreign invaders.
I have my potatoes 98.6 percent out of the ground.
My one Anushka hill had 15 potatoes with 12 as large as a goose egg or bigger and three marbles; my one Clearwater Russet had 15 potatoes with none smaller than a chicken egg.
Most large potatoes I have ever had in one hill.
I got one-half bushel out of my 4 russet hills.
The North garden's potato production was excellent this year.
Green Zebra tomatoes are still producing far more than I can use; I covered them from the frost so they will ripen on the vine.
South garden is doing well also , the one tomato down there has five tomatoes that should ripen this week; the corn did well so the squirrel will be fed well.
Cucumber, not sure why I put it in, but it is one of those Lemon Cucumbers, seed bombs, but it is still producing and they do taste good.
Squash was the only failure; I got one good one down South, other two rotten.
Up North, the vines covered over 1/3 of the garden and I got a whole two squash.
I ripped out the vines and they had a fair number of small one but they would never get near ripening.
They were flowering already in July where the first roots were but not one squash in that part of the garden; all were six or more feet over on the edge of the vine growth.
I may get one more along the fence if the frost did not zap the vine too badly.
I am assuming too much vine as it did not let the flowers get pollinated but it did seem to kill the volunteer Purple Peruvian potato that had covered the same area but at the same time there were very few insects flying around this summer, such as bees or even wasps like I normally would.
Did not see many Bumble Bees really till certain flowers they like started blooming.
Now they are numerous.
I did some digging where the potato vines were before squash covered them, and they were there for months, and got only about a dozen very small PP potatoes.
Down South I have not dug up the ones I let grown in the empty Rose garden space and I am curious to see what comes out of that.
It was a very good year for gardening but some plant cycles seemed out of whack too me. :o 8)
