Pulling the vines

Today I started pulling the sweet potato vines – the earliest ones have leaves that are turning yellow, and the nights are getting cooler, which means it’s time. We probably should have started digging them a couple of weeks ago, working from the earliest vines and moving toward the newer vines, which have taken over the rows on either side, but other things took priority. The end of the season is nigh, however, and the time has come.

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The thing about sweet potatoes is that they can be invasive, for lack of a better word. As you pull the vines from the frames themselves, you’ll find the tips of potatoes where they’ve started to heave themselves out of the soil.

Heaving sweet potatoes

 

This is, incidentally, how to determine where to start digging for the sweet potato bonanza: the potatoes will create mounds in the soil as they grow and displace the dirt. They’ll grow elsewhere too, of course, but the mounds are like the ancient Indian burial grounds that people build houses over: you know there’s something there, only in this case, it’s much more benevolent and will not suck your entire neighborhood into the netherworld a la Poltergeist.

Bonanza!

Because the vines have run rampant – why not, since we really had nothing else in that area? – when the vines crawled out of the rows in which the slips had been planted, snaking into the walkways and then into the rows on either side, a slow but steady takeover, they rooted down into the walkways as well as the rows. Leave them there, and they produce tubers in the walkways just as well as they do in the rows, as sweet potatoes don’t seem to care all that much about where they grow. As I pulled vines, the lumps in the walkways revealed themselves to be potatoes, grown right through the mulch and the plastic barrier. Some of them came up with the tugs on the vines.

Walkway potatoes

 

Some had to be cut out from the plastic barrier, as they’d grown too fat after the neck of the potato to come out easily.

Walkway rescue potatoes

 

Still others wound up growing sideways under the plastic, requiring a complete excavation.

Excavation potatoes

 

Keep in mind, this is just the beginning of the preliminary vine pull, and all of these potatoes were pulled from the walkway only, not the frames. In fact, these all came from the walkway two rows over from where the sweet potatoes were originally planted. Before it started raining, I’d pulled a pile of vines and came away from about 10 pounds of potatoes that were useless – they’d heaved out of the walkway and were scalded by the sun, rained on then dried, or eaten into by critters – and sixteen pounds of usable potatoes just from one area of one part of one walkway.

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This is going to be a banner year for the sweet potato haul, and that’s saying something as they’ve always done well here, even in poorer soil than this.

Progress on the asparagus front

Progress: three blocks cleared of asparagus and replanted in the new long row. There are two more 4x4s that need to be cleared – one is full of plants, the other sparsely populated, but between the two of them, they’ll likely fill a lot more of this row. The other asparagus bed, to the right of this one, is a 16×2, and I’ve decided instead of digging all that up, I’ll build a frame around it and year by year add more soil to it as it grows and we harvest, so the plants will force their way to the top and use the middle layers for rooting instead of the dense bottom where they’re punching through to the clay-like soil underneath (as that has no nutrients to speak of). Yes, that will be a bit of a long process, but farming teaches patience in a lot of ways. Once the remaining two 4x4s are cleared, I can finish off the first new N-S row, get it filled, then start on the next two in the same way.

I also decided that if I am crazy enough to expand again – if the CSA idea takes off, for instance – and we run more raised beds, we will not be hauling all the soil by hand. We’ll build out a row, and either with our own tractor (one day!) or a rented one, fill that row, then back out, build the next, fill it, etc., until it’s done. There is something to be said for the manual work of hauling all that soil, but it also takes quite a bit of time that could be spent on other things.

Asparagus!

Disappointing!

Every season, there is some kind of disappointment at the ranch. Sometimes, it is the entire season, like 2010, lost to cancer and surgery. Other times, it is low output, like 2012. This year, it was the tomatoes being flattened, although we still had a fairly good harvest, all things considered. This year’s major disappointment, however, is the bees: two swarms that were captured but did not stay, one swarm that was seen far too late to do anything about, one hive completely absconding without a trace of anything left. This afternoon, heading out to feed the bees, I tapped on the sides of the hives, and once again, it sound completely hollow on one and nearly so on another, so my fear is another hive absconded, and possibly two. I cannot for the life of me figure out why this would be. The state apiary inspector was here two months ago, and all four hives were just fine, and buzzing (no pun intended) with activity. Today, there is next to nothing in two of the hives. Tomorrow, if it’s slightly warmer and a lot less windy than today, I’ll go into the hives and see what’s left in each one. Hopefully, they’re all still home, just bundled into a ball against the chill. Otherwise, it will be yet another package order from a supplier – although perhaps it’s time to find another supplier, given the history of bees from this particular supplier.

Yes, it is a bit of food snobbery

There are lists with which I agree and those with which I don’t. I’m pretty much on the agree train with this one. A lot of the things on this list – corn pudding, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, green bean casserole – are inherently Southern, and people around these parts would be peeved if they didn’t make an appearance. That said: as much as I love marshmallows, and as much as I like sweet potatoes, I do not like them together (especially since someone insists on putting raisins in the potatoes before warming the dish, which makes it even worse, since raisins are for fresh eating and Raisin Bran cereal, and have no place in buns, cookies, or mashed sweet potatoes regardless of whether they will be topped with marshmallows or not). The green bean casserole thing is also intensely Southern, but I’ve never liked it. Maybe it would be different with fresh beans and onions, but I’m at the point in life that I’d rather relearn my eating on stuff I actually like and not stuff that brings up bad notions about food. The canned cranberry sauce that glops out on a plate when you open it is an abomination, IMO. That’s why I make my own from fresh cranberries and other ingredients. And my own gravy, because the instant stuff is loaded with salt, making it unpalatable.

I realize it may come across as snobbish, and I know people who love all of these things. But that’s the beauty of something like food: as many things there are to eat in this world – including weird things that some people could never imagine being food – you can probably find someone who absolutely loves eating it. Especially if that someone is Andrew Zimmern.