Potato Crop Failure

Underwhelming, isn't it? This is all the yield in potatoes from our 4 barrels. I'd love to know what I did wrong. There were lots of cutworms in the barrels, for one thing.

These potatoes we did get are delicious, and they will make (one batch of) nice potato salad. Still, I was really hoping for, like, 150 pounds of potatoes.

I want to try something similar next year, only with a cylinder of chicken wire instead of a barrel. I'm thinking with more air to the sides, it may do better. Am I wrong or right?

Dawn dish soap to the rescue

I showed you how eaten up our cabbages were getting in this post. I was washing out 7-gallon plastic jugs that had once contained cooking oil using Dawn dishwashing detergent to cut the oil, and got to looking at those cabbages, and in total disgust, dumped the oily, Dawn-y suds on the cabbages.

Guess what? Whatever was eating them, is gone! And the cabbages are doing okay! All but 2, which seemed not able to rebound and start to make a head. So I yanked those two out and the others are doing quite well.

Kieffer has a new job. He is now a CNA at Thornton Manor Nursing Home, the same place where Britta worked for 5 years, then Barry worked too. There's another Stahl there, too, Emily, one of Kieffer's classmates (a very distant relative possibly).

Garden update (lots of pictures)

"Black" hollyhocks (actually they are deep purple). A heritage variety we don't know the name of.

Horseradish which I just started from rootings. In a barrel so it doesn't escape.

These tomatoes are in the former chicken pen and are very, very happy
 to be rooting in a deep layer of old chicken poop. Lots of nitrogen.

Hops, taking over the garage as usual for this time of year.
People sometimes think we're growing cannabis. It's not surprising;
marijuana and hops are both closely related to hemp.

Wee little eggplants!

Potatoes in barrels.

More tomatoes, this time in the garden proper.
Lots of tomatoes setting, but look at all those yellow leaves.
Big difference from the chicken poop ones.
I have sent Barry out to buy fertilizer.

Sunflowers, growing tall. Barry planted them
rather randomly all over the yard.
He loves sunflowers. So do the birds.

Some nasty creature is eating all our cabbages.

Something new this year: Black beans!
Mostly just for fun; they are cheap to buy and you
have to grow a LOT of them to feed one person.

I was sprouting some black beans from the store
and decided to plant a few and they took right off.

New compost bins made out of wood pallets

Dehydrator

My dry-mesh open-air dehydrator is really working out well. It takes longer to dehydrate in it than it would in an electric one, at least in our climate (in the desert, it probably would not be much longer, if any), but it uses free solar and wind energy. So far we have dehydrated morel mushrooms, fresh parsley (I got it on clearance at the market), rhubarb, a lot of peaches, and now I have spinach leaves in it. I read an interesting piece on line about dehydrating spinach. You wash it, take the stems off, and dry the leaves until they are thoroughly crunchy-dry, then run them through the blender to make spinach flour, which you can then easily incorporate into soups and sauces or (and this is my favorite idea) into pasta dough to make spinach pastas.

Yesterday morning I picked through our row of spinach, taking every leaf big enough to pick, and it was decimated. All that went into the dehydrator. Lil Miss A commented that she wished she could have had one more spinach meal before I did that. I figured it was done for the year, because I was pretty brutal with my picking. But by evening time, the row had grown a whole bunch more spinach and it's ready to pick again. Amazing. And now Lil Miss A can have more fresh spinach for lunch.

The peach slices, by the way, are so delicious. The peaches when fresh were a little disappointing, picked early for shipment and so not very sweet when they finally did ripen. But when we (the girls and I) sliced them thin, dipped them in vinegar water anti-browning solution, then dehydrated them in the open air, all the sugar they contained was concentrated, and they are irresistible. I ate way more than I should straight out of the dehydrator.

Getting ready for church this morning... Today our family is providing the meal for fellowship hour after services. This year I made (surprise!) peach pies, 5 of them, to serve with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. I panicked when I got the pies ready, thinking there might not be enough for everybody. You just never know what attendance will be like in the summertime. So I quickly made a big pan of strawberry rhubarb crisp to keep as a backup. If we don't need it, we can bring it home.

Lil Miss A leaves this afternoon for her week at Village Creek Bible Camp. She is very excited.

UPDATE: We didn't even touch one of the pies. :) We will be eating pie and crisp for a week.