Garden Experiments
It's been a very beautiful and toasty warm spring. I've been taking advantage of the lovely weather and have been spending lots of time outside gardening. Because the garden beds at my rental are not necessarily in the best place, I've been focusing on planting in containers around my back patio.
Some of the containers I bought have peek a boo holes so you can check out and harvest potatoes from them. There's not much going on in there yet, but if I get some good peek a boo and harvest action, I'll record it and show you!
This year, due to the fact that I forgot some tiny potatoes in a bowl on my countertop, and they started growing small forests out of their little potato bodies, I decided to try my hand at growing a significant amount of potatoes, which is something I've never done before. I'm hoping I have enough to store for winter.
Someone told me that you can plant potato slips on their own — just like you do with sweet potato slips — allowing you to increase the number of potato plants you're growing, without having to sacrifice more potatoes to seed. I was able to triple the number of potato plants I'm growing by using this method. We'll see what the harvest looks like in a few months.
In that same countertop bowl I had some neglected sweet potatoes that were just starting to poke out sprouts of their own, so I decided to also try growing sweet potatoes this year. Something I've never done before.
To grow my slips, I half buried two sweet potatoes in a tub and started out by giving them a very humid and warm environment to grow in, by keeping them in a sunny spot, with the top on most of the day. As the weather got nicer out, and the slips started growing bigger, I started keeping the top off so they could have a little room to stretch their legs. It took a month for the slips to grow to a plantable size.
The first few I removed didn't have much in the way of roots, but a gardener I follow on youtube said he just plants these directly in soil, without first growing the roots in water, and they produce well for him. The second batch that I cut off, I took from below the soil line and they had already developed some pretty significant root systems, which I was really excited to see.
I have a pretty big deer problem here, and I heard that deer love eating sweet potato vines, so I bought some thick garden mesh to hopefully keep them out. I really like that it's black too, so it doesn't stand out as badly as that bright white garden mesh.
My third garden experiment, which I actually started in March was planting this very overgrown, forgotten garlic. Garlic is supposed to be planted in the fall, but I decided to just give it a go and plant this guy now to see what it would produce for me. It hasn't really done very well. As the greenery has been dying off, I've been digging up the tiny garlic bulbs and using those so they don't go to waste. They're about the size of a small garlic clove, so it's almost like I have been able to replace the bulb that I forgot on the counter, little by little.
It's all been fun and I've really enjoyed the learning experience. Growing my own food has helped me to realize and appreciate how much farmers go through to produce all of our food. Growing food comes with a pretty big learning curve — especially because my intention is to grow in a way that's healthy for my body, the environment, the critters and the beneficial bugs. I mean, even the 10,857,000 pests that want to eat my crops have a purpose and a place in this world too, so they shouldn't be eradicated either.
For now I'm just experimenting and learning anyway. Although I'd like to get there someday, I'm grateful that I'm not currently in a place where I need to provide the bulk of my own food. It's going to take quite a bit more practice before I'm ready for that.
Hi, I’m Kristen!
I envision a world where you and I rediscover what it is to be human, through connection with ourselves, each other and the natural world around us.