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Outdoor Corner: 2009 Garden wrap-up: Harvesting your crop of veggies
Gene Plihal
for Smoky River Express
By now most hunters have probably bagged something to put into the freezer. To go along with these game foods, there’s the matter of rounding out the meal with good, wholesome, garden vegetables. So, it’s time to summarize, as previously promised, how my garden grew and what I (we) did with it.
The potatoes were good though the experiment with the use of weeping tile was not as resoundingly effective as I had expected.
You’ll remember, if you read one of my previous articles on gardening, that I experimented with putting a 20 foot length of four inch weeping tile buried next to my potato seeds.
Then, during the summer I ran my watering hose into the tile and generously flooded it with water and fertilizer in hopes that evaporation would be less of a problem than surface watering and that the roots of the potato plant would get instant access to both fertilizer and water.
I recently harvested all of my potato hills and found that there was some difference in size and quantity between those plants that got the sub-surface inoculation and those plants that didn’t. Though the weeping tile spuds did better, probably not enough better to justify this rather labourious task being done again next year.
I raised Russian spuds for the first time. What an interesting potato which we fried up and found quite delicious. The Russian potato has a reddish interior (tongue in cheek, probably the result of being in a communist country all of those years!) and looked a bit like beets. The taste was unique and seemed somewhat more starchy. The production was low by comparison with the red or white potatoes (with the white interiors). But it is worth planting again, I think.
The Manitoba potato prevailed in terms of production and quality. That will be the mainstay of my garden again next year.
Carrots didn’t do well all summer until the late rains. We had a big crop of these. My good friend, Mors Kochanski, told me that he preserves his carrots in the root cellar and covers them with a layer of leaves. He maintains this keeps them rigid and firm well into May without the use of Viagra. (His humour, not mine.)
At our house we wash the carrots well after they are extracted from the garden and then we bag them in grocery bags with paper towels between the layers of carrots. The towels absorb the moisture off the carrots and keep them fresh, in the fridge, well into April or even May. We store them in the crisper of the fridge. Some people try putting carrots into a giant container with dry sand in it. We’ve had mixed results with this approach, not to mention the mess and time consumption involved.
We had bushels of tomatoes thanks to the great plants from Fern’s Greenhouse and Lucienne’s sister-in-law, Pat Thibault. Bush beefsteak, Sweet Millions and Juliets all came through big time. The heat we had, coupled with copious amounts of water from my dugout, did the job, though they were late in ripening.
Beets and Khalrabi did exceptionally well this year. (When don’t they?)
Garlic was poor, while onions seemed to do well in spots and poorly in others.
Rhubarb grew to new heights this year and we harvested several stalks for pies and Lucienne’s world famous (well maybe not world famous but at least in the Smoky River Region) rosettes. Call her if you want the recipe.
Most of these end up at the lake for desserts there around the campfire.
Speaking of campfires, next week we’ll talk about wood harvesting for the winter and for lake campfires. Until then, good hunting, but more importantly, be a good hunter.
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