January 31, 2011

On Saturday I harvested some Okinawan sweet potatoes. I planted some tuber segments about 3 months ago in various beds of the garden and I dug up a couple of them and harvested some young tubers. I prefer to eat them young and each one I harvested was about 4 to 5 inches long and about 5 or 6 ounces. Not farm fair show stoppers but perfect for what I do with them. I used about half of what I harvested and set the others aside for later.

January ended having received about 4.21 inches of rain. The wind never got very strong this month and except for the watering of my seedlings from rain barrel water, I didn't have to water the garden. About 3 inches of that rain fell in one night (January 12) so it wan't a nice soaking rain but after December's downpours the 4 inches was just fine.

Other than harvesting a little, I mostly weeded in the garden. I've kept on top of the weeds and it doesn't take long to remove most of my weed problems. It is mostly grass coming in under the edging, but there is the occasional nut sedge, amaranth and oxalis. As time goes by I have to weed less and less, which is nice.

I emptied one of my compost bins onto a bed that hasn't had compost for while and needed some fluffing of the soil. I also threw some compost on the disturbed sweet potato vines to get them the root some more and produce more tubers. I have two other compost bins that are "cooking" right now so after I had emptied out the one I threw in a bag of shredded paper (bills, junk mail and the like) to get that bin ready for veggie waste and garden trimmings.

I thinned the lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli and Chinese cabbage seedlings. They are all doing quite nicely and growing well. The daikon and turnips will need some thinning in a few days. The onion and carrot seeds are germinating already and I think at least one of my winged bean seeds is germinating. I haven't grown that before so I'm not positive what the seedlings look like. I'm keeping my fingers crossed because it took me a while to get the seeds and they were fairly expensive (by my standards).

My tomatoes are starting to flower and a few have small tomatoes on them and the eggplants ate starting to flower again, as are the pepper plants. The long squash I'm trying along the side fence are growing. They are just starting to vine out and produce tendrils. Once they hit that stage they grow like crazy. I'm hoping that by growing these on the fence I'll be able to get a few more fruit than I've been able to get in my small garden beds. If this works, I'm going to try the next batch of Kabocha squash that way as well.