Harvested and delivered to the Lexington Food Pantry:
2 ½ pounds of asparagus and smaller amounts of scallions and radishes
Fertilizing and Planting
Some of the things we got done today:
- Planted: cantaloupes, bok choy, marigolds (anti-bug) and probably more vegetables that I didn’t know about
- Mulched and made more paths around the garden
- Transplanted stray volunteers like cilantro and dill from middle of beds of potato, melon, etc to edge of garden where they can continue to grow.
- Weeded and then fed weeds to chickens
- “Hilled” potatoes
More from the garden
Hilling
What is “hilling” potatoes? You start potato plants by settling them into a dug-out trough. As the plants grow, you move dirt from the sides of planted trough to cover the base of the plant. Doing this regularly means that by the middle of the season, the potatoes are growing in dirt mounds, with troughs on either side from where you kept getting dirt to cover the bottoms of the potato plants…thus the “hilling”.
Did you know there are such things as good weeds? Carla had us leave one kind of bushy weed. Aphids are attracted to this weed and so become another natural defense against pests. But beware; I almost left one of the bushy weeds only to be told to take it out since that one was the toxic nightshade!
New asparagus shoots look amazingly like dill! So if you are sent to weed the asparagus bed, leave them. In that location, they are unlikely to be dill needing to be transplanted.
Remember me writing about garlic and how to know when it is ready to be harvested? The “tell” was in the leaves. They need to spiral and then un-spiral before you want to pick. Well, one of the plants started to spiral. Here is what it looks like:
Garlic Frond Corkscrews
Working: Hancock, Redeemer, St. Nicholas
Weather: Warm and a bit humid