Quite enough already

The great “potato harvest” is happening this weekend!  This is going to be quite a treat—I’ve never done anything quite like this.

 

Also, the shard and peas are being declared “finished” for the season and those beds, along with the ‘taters, are going to be prepped for the summer.  The lettuce is likely going to be declared “finished”, too, since those plants have decided to send long, tall growths out and may be flowering soon (yea, lettuce flowers, who’d have thunk it?).

 

Things we’ll do differently next year:  properly trellis the peas with chicken wire or some other fencing, shrink the area for the peas a little, move the shard to a more hospitable location, plant some earlier beans to get a jump on the long storage pantry foods.  I like where we have the tomatoes and peppers.  Those are tall plants so they’ll probably stay in their little patch for next year.  The potatoes, however, got much bigger than I expected them to.  They’re going to have to move.  We’re also going to plant a LOT less sprouts and broccoli (about ½ to ¼ as much) and a lot more varieties of stuff—maybe beets or something else I’m not sure if I like—just to have a wider variety of food and lower amount of wasted food.  We haven’t been able to eat all our lettuce, and I have no idea how we’re going to eat all of the broccoli and sprouts—we’re going to get a ton of that stuff.  Strawberries are definitely on the list for next year, too.

 

The peas were a big disappointment.  They grew well enough, I suppose, but we just didn’t seem to get much production out of them.  Maybe we didn’t harvest frequently enough, but there never really seemed to be enough to really bother to harvest.  Then, when the plants grew bigger, they just crushed the rope trellis we put up, so that certainly didn’t help matters.  Remedial action is just going to be too much of a pain in the butt and it’s toward the end of their season anyway, so this weekend will likely feature those fellows getting yanked right out of the ground and any residual peas will be considered the final harvest for those guys this season.