Potatoes, and other stuff at the home garden

Here we are in the last full week of September, and the garden year is winding down fairly quickly now. The weather is getting less predictable and the nice sunny days are fewer than than they were. This trend leads to a bit of concern with getting out in the garden to harvest the crops.

Digging potatoes is one of those things I had been holding off of doing in the hopes of a few dry days in a row so the dirt wouldn't be so wet for the digging. Unfortunately, we just haven't been having that kind of weather, it's been raining every 2-3 days for the past couple of weeks. We didn't want to wait much longer to dig the potatoes because we're not going to get very many more warm days this year, and digging potatoes in cold weather just isn't much fun.

Yesterday turned out to be a rather nice day, so my house mate, Teresa, decided to start digging the potatoes. My back was pretty well shot from working in the community garden plots the day before, so she did the digging in the home garden. She was well underway by the time I got out to take some pictures. She was putting all the potatoes in the wheelbarrow as she dug them.

Not much left to dig here.

I decided to take a few pictures of the rest of the garden while she was taking a break from digging.
This is the raised bed that I had all the outdoor tomato plants in this year. The Black Krimm plants were pretty much done, so I had pulled them out and cleaned up that section a couple days before. I still have some Brandywine tomatoes and San Marzano tomatoes getting ripe. I put down some half composted straw on the section of the bed that I cleaned up to help with weed suppression for fall and spring.

The popcorn is pretty much ready for harvesting now.

The chipper/shredder is on standby to start taking care of all the cornstalks and other garden debris as we clean out the garden.

After Teresa finished digging all the potatoes, I took a picture of the wheelbarrow almost full. We got a pretty good harvest this year. There are 3 varieties of potatoes in the wheelbarrow, Goldrush yellow russets, white russets, and Yukon Gold yellow potatoes.

Teresa has started picking the popcorn, but she only picked 2 rows so far. We only have so much room for drying the popcorn cobs. Once the popcorn cobs have all been picked, the cornstalks will be pulled out of the garden and run through the shredder to add mulch to the garden. That seems like a much better idea than hauling them off to the city's compost pile. Put the material back into the garden where it came from.

Well, that's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!