the last of the potatoes!

our harvest this year was dismal. not a complete failure but pretty dismal. we started building raised beds in march, april was all about getting the seeds started indoors and june and july were filled with rainy, gray, overcast days. during august we were harvesting daily fruit and veg from the garden but there was no great harvest of produce to be canned or frozen. we have learned much for this coming spring/summer and we are hopeful that this year will be bountiful.

the one star this year was our potatoes. we have been growing potatoes in tires for 4 years now and they have always been our stars! the year before last, back in the city, we grew about 160lbs of 3 different kinds of potatoes - we eat a lot of potatoes around here! we planted them early and started harvesting baby potatoes in july. the potatoes lasted us right until the following april-may. growing your own potatoes can save you a lot of money!

this year, we planted 18 tires, 3 tires high, with 3 different kinds of potatoes. our harvest this year was about 120lbs of potatoes - not too bad for a horrible growing season! and today, jambaloney harvested the last of the potatoes as we are expecting a few days of well below freezing (that's the good thing about tires - you can harvest as needed until you start to get freezing temps that stay!). we have been eating our own potatoes since this past july and this last harvest yielded about 30lbs - those potatoes should last until the end of march. between april and july we will wait for potatoes as we try to eat as seasonally as possible. and when we run out of potatoes - we run out of them and will substitute turnip and/or cabbage in its place.

here is a pic of the tire gardens when we first planted the potatoes:



it looks pretty messy as we had not had a chance to properly clear the land at this point! and here is a pic taken about 3 weeks later, after we had hilled the potatoes, and then added another tire:



and here is a pic of the empty tires, all harvested now, and they will be stacked nicely to await use again this april. as you can see, we haven't stacked them nicely yet! but as you can see, we have finished clearing all of this side of the land.



(note: if you look closely to the right of the pic, you get a sneak peek at throw-together-shed-number-2. future upcoming posts on the tale of two sheds.)

and here is the last of the potatoe harvest 2011/2012. these are organic brown russets and organic red chieftains. we ate all of the goldrush potatoes already.



not too shabby! and these can get us through to the end of march and we will enjoy every delicious one of them!