Author Topic: The Gardening Thread  (Read 44059 times)

Jitter

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Re: The Gardening Thread
« Reply #285 on: September 22, 2020, 11:43:11 AM »
Potatoes! Boil ‘em, mash ‘em, stick ‘em in the stew!

You got some real nice pink ones! And how wonderful that your son is interested in such things, and wants to experiment and take care os his plants! Do let us know if it survives.

We got a large bowl of potatoes one year when I found sometime in the summer (after Midsummer definitely but I think it was WELL after Midsummer) that there were a few ex-potatoes in the fridge from Christmas. The tubers were shriveled and the roots and shoots were over 15 cm long, but they appeared dead. So they went into the gardening compost heap. Sometime late September I noticed that the plants growing vigorously on top of the compost looked very much like potato plants. And indeed, the shriveled starts had grown and produced any beautiful taters :) They weren’t planted or anything, just thrown into the heap, and I guess something was thrown on top soon after that.

It would be interesting to know what potatoes become like if left on their own for, say, 90 years. Would they still grow? I think the tubers would be smaller but still harvestable, but this is just a hunch. Róisín, would you happen to know? Some potatoes are widely grown in home gardens in Finland so it would seem like a plausible addition to the teams rations.
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moredhel

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Re: The Gardening Thread
« Reply #286 on: September 22, 2020, 12:55:12 PM »
90 years are long. Normally you avoid growing potatoes for yeasr in the same spot because organisms like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globodera_rostochiensis or other parasites could multiply there easily and only a few potatoes will survive. Maybe the winters in Finland would be cold enough to eliminate the nematodes. But the Winters in Finland could eliminate the potatoes too.

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Re: The Gardening Thread
« Reply #287 on: September 22, 2020, 08:04:10 PM »
We got a large bowl of potatoes one year when I found sometime in the summer (after Midsummer definitely but I think it was WELL after Midsummer) that there were a few ex-potatoes in the fridge from Christmas. The tubers were shriveled and the roots and shoots were over 15 cm long, but they appeared dead. So they went into the gardening compost heap. Sometime late September I noticed that the plants growing vigorously on top of the compost looked very much like potato plants. And indeed, the shriveled starts had grown and produced any beautiful taters :) They weren’t planted or anything, just thrown into the heap, and I guess something was thrown on top soon after that.

Around here, some people grow potatoes entirely without soil. Dump some seaweed, eelgrass, straw, etc. on the ground (often rock!), chuck your seed potatoes on, dump more stuff on top, keep adding as they grow. They do just fine, thanks, and it's really easy to poke in and steal a few little new potatoes before you're ready for the final harvest.

As for whether they'd survive in the wild for long, I'm not sure. moredhel has a good point re pests, and I'm pretty sure they'd die out once they got shaded by re-growing trees.
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Keep Looking

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Re: The Gardening Thread
« Reply #288 on: September 22, 2020, 10:23:11 PM »
When I was younger one time I think we grew potatoes in tires? You'd stack the tires on top of each other and fill it with dirt and compost and put the seed potatoes in there, but I think sometimes you would stack another tire on top? I can't remember very well, I was quite small.

I do gotta say though, grubbing for potatoes in your vegetable garden, sticking your hands in the dirt and digging up the potatoes - it's very fun.
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midwestmutt

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Re: The Gardening Thread
« Reply #289 on: September 23, 2020, 10:23:37 AM »
So having put in one bed of flowers and still under shelter at home restrictions I decided to beautify other areas of the yard. Here on the east side of the garage I put in some store bought sunflowers and some contrasting red flowers whose name escapes me as the ID placard blew away in a big storm.
https://64.media.tumblr.com/c689c8d1b81210638f62156078d599a6/e431c8bfa2221b39-d6/s2048x3072/b7caf9ead2c1bd86542bb61418b40d6b314828e0.jpg
https://64.media.tumblr.com/dc8bc1a7b5cc08937d77ce7c071f5d63/7e8fb3a633f972df-d8/s2048x3072/b49130ac1e141e7586390a8b5648c3c3c2bc2e51.jpg
Long established catnip grows in several parts of the yard for our kitties over the years.
https://64.media.tumblr.com/92782c22df2c51f8a3937c8f3e4b0df5/97ae001e4b3ec411-94/s2048x3072/db1d6321f3aa0e3d8c4d64890282f89613f18770.jpg
The east side of the house has the most variety
https://64.media.tumblr.com/b87edb53706ff91a20c6b34e4fe37b0e/e2490fee41a29644-29/s2048x3072/d05ae9eb3ca0d6d819cb3065ece07b04cf3739ce.jpg
https://64.media.tumblr.com/8d75d13daca9690b3ba39dd6127a401a/b23a4c55e7763105-75/s540x810/edf47403e7a349e7aa497708ac7d1662d9a52668.jpg
https://64.media.tumblr.com/f453b85a280d073c77df01201500cca4/bf4557a869aa109d-d8/s2048x3072/f7ae5fd8d7a251ed5e6d183ee26cff5a3c1dd3a4.jpg
https://64.media.tumblr.com/1e84aef907fe700c51977e865ecd1467/b23a4c55e7763105-72/s540x810/cdddbd58f706e6d8e1d3bdc298918bc045881820.jpg
https://64.media.tumblr.com/a9b50f82f2e33ec9faa82e22e4eb3976/16d1aa150d253a85-bb/s2048x3072/71f78b5d21e2e3cd47bcae35335239bd85a9bac7.jpg
« Last Edit: September 23, 2020, 10:33:36 AM by midwestmutt »
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moredhel

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Re: The Gardening Thread
« Reply #290 on: September 23, 2020, 11:04:22 AM »
When I was younger one time I think we grew potatoes in tires? You'd stack the tires on top of each other and fill it with dirt and compost and put the seed potatoes in there, but I think sometimes you would stack another tire on top? I can't remember very well, I was quite small.

You remeber it correctly. It is useful to put enother tire on top and fill it with compost. The plant the grows a long stem under the soil. Under best conditions the plants will produce potatoes on the completet subterran part of the stem. The longer it is the more potatoes you get.

I do gotta say though, grubbing for potatoes in your vegetable garden, sticking your hands in the dirt and digging up the potatoes - it's very fun.

Big fun even in a planting pot. Next year i will try to grow my favourite sort (Belana). Great potato and it seems to rise my blood sugar a little less than other potatoes.

Jitter

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Re: The Gardening Thread
« Reply #291 on: September 23, 2020, 01:23:32 PM »
Midwestmutt, I think the red ones are Impatiens, also known as busy Lizzie :)

Are the orange ones with the white and pink cosmos also cosmos? (Cosmoses??). Cosmos are very beautiful but I’ve never had them except for a chocolate cosmos I bought as a plant for one of my big pots last summer, or maybe the one before that.
« Last Edit: September 23, 2020, 01:34:13 PM by Jitter »
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Róisín

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Re: The Gardening Thread
« Reply #292 on: September 24, 2020, 02:09:21 AM »
Jitter, I do know, and the answer is that it varies, depending on a number of factors, including soil, climate, potato variety, and whether your potato plants were grown vegetatively (from a tuber with ‘eyes’ which are buds that give rise to new plants which are genetically much the same as the parent plant - basically clones), or from actual seeds, which can be found in those pretty, sweet-tasting and highly poisonous berries that sometimes follow the flowers on potato plants. I must emphasise: do not eat the berries, or leave them anywhere that children or pets can get at them. When I say poisonous I mean that potato berries are similar in their effects to the berries of the related Belladonna or deadly nightshade, perhaps with a little less sedation and more gut and liver symptoms, because there is more solanine and solasodine in potato berries.

However, those nasty berries are useful because they contain seeds. The seeds are small, flat and kidney-shaped, rather like those of the related tomato or capsicum. Growing any plant from seeds rather than from cuttings, offshoots or clone buds gives you much more genetic variability among the offspring, especially if the seeds have been fertilised by pollen from a different potato variety. That is how new varieties of potato are developed.

So growing potatoes from actual seeds, rather than from the sprouting tubers that are sold as ‘seed potatoes’ is very much a lottery. You may get something very like the parent, or a wonderful new variety, but most likely the result will not be amazing. Sigh. (Says the person who has been trying for decades to breed another blight-resistant potato.) what you will quite often get is a reversion to the ancestral wild potato, which is tough, hardy, a good groundcover, about as frost resistant as any potato gets, and which produces tubers about the size of a smallish walnut. I eat mine but they are not the most delicious of spuds. I mostly grow them and allow them to flower so as to have pollen for my experiments, because the ancestral potato is resistant to many of the diseases that afflict modern hybrids.

The ones that are sold as ‘certified seed potatoes’ are ones that have been specifically grown in an environment free of the common potato diseases and pests, and/or are resistant to such, so usually safer to grow from, though if a spud sprouts in my cupboard I will usually plant it.

As for the potatoes in forsaken gardens, I have lots of experience with those, including while poking about in old ruins in the Central Victorian Goldfields area, where one of my sons now has a farm, plus abandoned gardens and farms in Gippsland and the Snowies. As I may have mentioned, I lived for some years in Walhalla, a ghost town in the part of Gippsland that runs up into the foothills of the Snowy Mountains, while I helped a mate restore and reopen an old gold mine. Back in the day, Walhalla was quite a big regional town, partly because of the gold rush, partly from timber getting and farming in the surrounding areas. Having the railway also helped. But early to mid last century the railway closed, the easily accessible gold ran out, (still plenty there but hard and dangerous to get - much of the area has terrain you can fall off and underground water very close to the surface), and the place went from a roaring town big enough to have three breweries, more than a dozen pubs, lots of shops, a fancy bandstand and several suburbs to a ghost town with a population of seventeen.

So when I wasn’t down the mine or exploring/prospecting, one of the things I used to do was poke about the gardens of the old abandoned miners’ cottages. I found all manner of fascinating stuff, much of which I transplanted to the gardens of the surviving population in Walhalla itself or in nearby Mormontown and Maidentown, or shared with another mate who was a hermit at Coppermines. I found pæonies, lilies and all manner of other flowers, and took cuttings of old apple, pear and mulberry varieties to graft onto trees in the town. I foraged for vegetables, finding not only many kinds of potatoes but carrots, kale, cucurbits, spinach, parsnips, and transferred roots, tubers or seeds to the gardens of the town. We ate well considering that the nearest shops were 40k/26 miles away. Many of those potatoes were varieties I knew, unchanged and growing from the old days, some were types I had never seen. All good.
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Róisín

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Re: The Gardening Thread
« Reply #293 on: September 24, 2020, 02:40:31 AM »
Keep Looking, moredhel and Vulpes, I know about growing spuds in old car tyres (one of my sons uses big tractor tyres). It works but mine seem to do better in the ground or in raised beds. The drainage needs to be perfect to avoid blight and other fungal diseases. My gran used to grow potatoes in and under layers of seaweed. They tasted good and were mostly disease free. Keep, I meant to ask: in WA, do people still call that process of grubbing around the edges of the potato plants for tiny sweet new potatoes ‘bandicooting’?

I find starting a new potato bed to be a great way to convert unwanted lawn or rough grass into productive food garden. First I put down fertiliser on the grass, water it in and put down a layer of mixed straw and shredded paper or cardboard, with seaweed if I can only get some, on top of that and water it in. On top of that I lay out seed potatoes three or four to a square metre, and add another layer of straw, shredded paper and a bit of compost, building up the layers as the potato haulms (vines) grow so the stems are partly buried. When the vines die back at the end of summer I harvest the spuds, saving some to plant on the next patch of grass, add more mulch and fertiliser to the patch of ground, and plant the reclaimed patch with cabbages, broccoli or kale that winter. Good way to turn lawn or weeds to food garden. Jerusalem artichokes/sunchokes can be grown the same way.
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Jitter

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Re: The Gardening Thread
« Reply #294 on: September 24, 2020, 06:46:20 AM »
Thank you Róisín! I knew  you'd know! And the story is again fascinating! Thank you :)
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Keep Looking

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Re: The Gardening Thread
« Reply #295 on: September 24, 2020, 08:34:24 AM »
Keep, I meant to ask: in WA, do people still call that process of grubbing around the edges of the potato plants for tiny sweet new potatoes ‘bandicooting’?

I don't know for certain whether people use the term 'bandicooting' frequently or not, but it definitely sounds familiar - I must have heard it somewhere! So - maybe.
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wavewright62

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Re: The Gardening Thread
« Reply #296 on: November 23, 2020, 05:53:24 PM »


An Attempt is being made at growing jicama on my office windowsill.  Our growing season is too short and wet to grow them properly, but I also cannot buy them, even in the Asian produce shops.  3 of 7 germinated and gotten to this stage, we'll see how we are come June or July, when they should be ready to harvest.  I haven't quite figured out what I'll do about the fact that they're climbing vines!
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Róisín

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Re: The Gardening Thread
« Reply #297 on: November 24, 2020, 03:24:31 AM »
Cool, Wavewright! Maybe you could set up a decorative trellis to shade your window as well as to give the plants something to climb on? I will be very interested to see how they go in pots.
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Re: The Gardening Thread
« Reply #298 on: November 24, 2020, 06:32:02 PM »
I hope I get to that stage - 2 of them are developing yellow spots already on their leaves.   :onni: :( :siv: :'(  I'm going to let them dry out pretty well, but we'll see.
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Jitter

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Re: The Gardening Thread
« Reply #299 on: May 08, 2021, 07:44:44 PM »
We have recently bought an almost 120 year old house, and at least @SkyWhalePod has asked to see what it looks like. Today I took some spring pictures so here you go.



Wood anemones!

A huge picture dump under the cut to save browsing effort

Spoiler: spring has sprung • show






Please disregard the current building supplies



There are also building supplies from the previous owner, and the ones before them...



I was wondering and even worried that there are no rowans on the entire plot, but there are!








Some assembly required


There are some apparent flowerbeds, but no flowers in them


Rampant gooseberries (I think)



Wood anemones again! I love them



Which is good, as there are loads




There are also a lot of what I hope will be columbines (aquilegias)



























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