Mr Bill's Dirt Garden

iammr.bill · **Posted:** Sat Oct 15, 2011 12:36 am

Have dirt in my blood. Raised with gardens in one form or the other for most of my life. Moved 33 times in my life and parents had gardens to feed a family on small salaries. Not much interest in gardens when I was young, but I seem to be gaining interest more and more these last few years.

Tried to do the vegetable gardening thing a few years ago, but being out on the road traveling for my job is not condusive to weeding, watering, and harvesting. I'd come home and the weeds would be 6-8 feet tall. Bummer.

Needless to say, I'm fighting the weed seeds from years past.

Ever since we bought this place 9 years ago, I've been making compost. Leaves, topsoil, kitchen scraps, goat and horse manure, lawn clippings, moldy hay, etc... So now the dirt in the garden is amazing. Dark, loamy soil that I am making into raised beds; raised dirt rows and wooden raised beds.

They have to be raised due to the wheelchair. Bummer again. An old accident is catching up with me. Life happens, eh

Have a pile of bricks that I'll be making into pathways between the beds to make it easier to roll around on. That will be interesting to make. Haven't ever made a brick walkway before, but I have books. Now just have to find the time and the energy.

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iammr.bill · **Posted:** Sat Oct 15, 2011 12:45 am

We made these potato beds where we could plant a slip in the dirt on the bottom and when it started growing and gained a few leaves, we would dump old hay on top of the plant. The potato would grow through the hay and make a few new leaves. We would dump some more hay on top. Kept on going to the top of the bed, then let the plant grow.
Worked pretty well, although the heat really did them after a few months. Harvested the plants as they were dying off from the heat and lack of water. :dont:

Had probably a full 5 gallon bucket of spuds from 6 plants in one raised bed.
Gone in a week. We really like our spuds.
Let the bed go for the summer, then noticed that a potato plant had started growing on it's own. Well cool. So now we have a lonely volunteer spud that has the whole raised bed to itself. I covered it over with a piece of chicken wire to keep the chickens from scratching the hay from around it. We shall see how it goes.

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iammr.bill · **Posted:** Sat Oct 15, 2011 12:49 am

I can't wait to see what is under all that Sweet Potato vining mess. These things have been started from 4"-6" long slips nipped off another vine. So we are looking at maybe 5 mother vines started from snippets. Look how they are covering the entire bed. I actually mow the vines with the riding mower when they get out in the pathway. They still grow. Just amazing...

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iammr.bill · **Posted:** Sat Oct 15, 2011 12:54 am

And there is the watermelon vine that I just couldn't bear to pull out. It's giving us a second crop of melons. No one has ever heard of a second crop of watermelons. And sweet! Wow, these things taste good. I'm doing better lately with watering now that I have some good soaker hoses laid out. Just turn them on for a few hours either in the morning or evening.
I'll be laying in bed just about to drift off and remember I left the hose on. Ooops. I'm getting better at it, mostly because I have a hose timer now.

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Jaymie · **Posted:** Sat Oct 15, 2011 8:15 am

looks great Mr Bill

I wish we could get potatoes to happen :dunno:

veggie boy · **Posted:** Sat Oct 15, 2011 8:29 am

Nice plot there mate. You have so much space - looks like you will end up with masses of produce.

I isolated my sweet potatoes last year to a contained bed in an effort to get a decent crop in a small area and not have plants popping up everywhere else the following year. Not sure it has woked very well in that when the vine slowed in winter there didn't seem to be any eating size tubers under the ground (at least I didn't find any when I did a bit of ferreting - though there were plenty of tubers starting to grow. I left the plant and it is starting to take off again, so am hoping the tubers will now develop and I'll get a crop. Will watch with interest what you harvest and hope that you don't have issues with the grub or beetle that often turns my SP to honeycombe/swiss cheese.

Over the last year or 2 I have come to the (kinda obvious) realisation that my number one concentration in the garden should be on staple crops that we eat all the time. For this reason Potatoes and sweet potatoes are included in my priority list. Next challenge is to make sure I pull my finger out and get them in at the right time in a given season. This year I got my big bed of potatoes in way too late, meaning that they were only really taking off when spring started. Here in South East Queensland it is most productive to grow over winter provided you can avoid the frosts (a bit of a challenge for me here, but the frosts we did have this year did not affect the potatoe plants I had in at the time, which was a good thing). The result of my late planting is that my big bed of plants has been hit pretty hard by leaf pests and also stresssed by the sun in the hottest part of the day. As a result they are already starting to die back and some investigation has revealed I'm probably only going to get a few medium sized potatoes from each plant. This is in contrast to my pontiacs planted at the right time (only a small bed I'm affraid) which I am getting a good harvest from. It's all a learning experience I guess and I suppose I should start keeping a gardenning callendar to remind me and drive me to plant things at the optimum time.

Faye · **Posted:** Sat Oct 15, 2011 3:38 pm

The sweet potatoes do look great Mr Bill :thumb:

I hope you have more success with your tubers than me, as I am experiencing the same as Veggie boy. They grow great for me over summer with good water and they smother the weeds, but my tubers are not fantastic and only look like they are thinking about fattening up. I wonder what triggers the tubers to swell, fertiliser or temperature maybe. :dunno:

Ours grow all year round and are more leaf than tuber.
Guess I need to do a bit more research :learn:

They sell the new shoots at the markets and are steamed as Asian greens.

bushy · **Posted:** Sat Oct 15, 2011 4:29 pm

Was about to say [Faye beat me to it...] the runner tips are magnificent steamed in stir fries or whatever.
Must be the temperatures that make them fill out Faye, as its not time if they grow all year round at your place. :dunno:

iammr.bill · **Posted:** Sat Oct 15, 2011 10:40 pm

Heard somewhere that the temps are what make the sweet potato plants take off. It's like a grade in school, which I'll do in F and C.
60F / 15C plant after the dirt temperature reaches this point
70F / 21C shoots will start to grow
80F / 26C Noticable growth starts happening
90F / 32C is really good growing
100F / 37C and above is the best

Above the 100F/37C mark and they start wrapping themselves around your ankles and the mower, pulling you in, looking for more footholds...

Like I posted before, I've been composting for years so the dirt is exceptional. But now you have me worried that there aren't any tubers under that mass of vines. Still going to wait another month or so until we get our first frost before I start digging around.

Where the cauliflower is planted now, in the wooden raised bed, we grew the original sweet potatoes. They did pretty well, giving us a 5 gallon pail full of tubers. Some of them were small roots, some of them were roasting size. They taste fine to me! Those vines were the ones we cut some slips from to plant in the bed in the above picture.

If (see you have me worried now) the plants don't give us any tubers on a test dig and the frost kills the plants, I'm going to be VERY dissapointed. We get some low temps here during the winter months and they won't last to grow back next year.

bushy · **Posted:** Sun Oct 16, 2011 2:24 pm

When I lived in a frosty area I could never get sp to overwinter, even by covering in straw and plastic sheeting.
Also, check around, there are many varieties and some tolerate cold better than others
White skin white inside did well in the cold from memory.
My faves are white skin but purple inside...nice eating, dont discolor or go soft.

dufflight · **Posted:** Sun Oct 16, 2011 5:24 pm

I use a spade to cut and push some of the sweet potato vines under the soil. The new roots that grow from this area produce the tubers.

iammr.bill · **Posted:** Sun Oct 16, 2011 11:32 pm

So it's not the mother root like a (choose your color) potato that gives the tubers, but the vining and rooting part? I should be alright to get some harvest since they seem to root along the vines. I figured those roots were to get a foothold and continue reaching out. If this is the case, then I shall nix the plans to have them cover an arbor or climb a trellis. Will have to leave them on the ground where they can do their thing.

I grow them for the produce, not their beauty although they do have sweet smelling blossoms. And it attracts the bees. Have had bumblebees, honeybees, and a few unidentified flying insects do their gathering of the necter from the sweet potato blossome.

Honeybees, I have recently found out, are flying from a place down the road that has hives. They sell at the farmers market in town. I go through alot of honey. The plants are growing in my garden, but they harvest the honey, then sell it back to me. Hhhhmmmm interesting. Maybe next year we can build some hives.

bushy · **Posted:** Mon Oct 17, 2011 10:38 am

Yep, the sp keep forming tubers all along the runners, but only in the ground. They will climb up trees or fences.
As for bees, they travel up to 5kms [3miles] to collect pollen.

iammr.bill · **Posted:** Mon Oct 17, 2011 2:51 pm

Once I get my garden and hives established, they won't have to go far.

Planning on herbs and plants that will draw the pollinators in to take care of the vegetables and fruit.

Cooked dinner tonight with homemade pasta using our chicken eggs and peppers from the dirt garden to make roasted yellow pepper sauce. Made fresh baked bread but it's about half gone already. She gave away the ripe watermelon to a friend without me knowing about it, along with some of the banana peppers from the AP system.
No worries, at least they went to a good home.
Something to be said for cooking and eating a meal using ingredients from your own garden.

Egg production has dropped dramatically. Might have to hang some lights out in the coops. Tis autumn here.

iammr.bill · **Posted:** Tue Oct 25, 2011 7:23 am

Maybe it was the caffine in the coffee but yesterday...

Hung some lights in the chicken coop
Rested
Then helped the wife and kids dig up the sweet potatoes (she couldn't wait)

Now remember these were grown from cuttings from the mother plant, not actual potato slips. All the tubers were at the plant itself, not along the vines. 4 five gallon buckets full from 6 cuttings...

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