Moving Along

The new container garden is coming along nicely.  I've already been picking Swiss chard for steaming and soups, and the pole beans are just now getting little pods on them.  Those are Mississippi Skip beans aka White Half Runner beans.  I have several big pots of those and also some Rattlesnake beans in different locations around the property.

Today I had to quit work setting up another pot due to smoke.  I think there might have been a brush fire upwind, heard a helicopter circling for some time around noon.  Seems as though I'm getting smoke every morning around 1000 hours EST, so I'd better set my alarm for 0600 to stay ahead of it.  I don't observe Daylight Savings Time, it makes no sense to me whatsoever.  I recently learned that the principle opposition to it came historically from farmers, then for some unknown reason the media reversed that and said it was for the benefit of farmers.  So in the end it benefits no one, yet we do it anyway.

They said today that we tied another record for heat yesterday.  My mizuna looks awful, it just lays down like it's exhausted.  Turnips are not known for their heat resistance...mizuna is a variety of turnip greens.  I won't be growing so much of it next year, it's too sensitive to heat.

I decided to plant all three varieties of sweet potato in the big pots...the 100 liter size.  Nothing wrong with a little variety.  I don't get along with the high sugar content, but I've found that cutting the potatoes into chunks and parboiling them lowers the sugar considerably.  Then I can store them in the fridge and use as needed. I currently have Porto Rico, Liberty, and Hannah growing in the garden.  They're each very different in their flavor and consistency...Porto Rico is high in carotenes, moist and sweet; Liberty is cream-colored, dry, and nutty-flavored; Hannah is cream-colored also, dry and starchy.  I like them all.  I would love to find a sweet potato that's very starchy and very low in sugar, but I'm not sure such a thing exists.

The sweet potatoes are being stimulated by the hot sun, they love this weather.  It's always best to pay attention to these seasonal changes...I'm going all-out with sweet potatoes from now on.  It's time to plant the long beans too, they also love warm weather.  That would be Vigna sesquipedalis.  They always do well for me and produce loads of those long, tender string beans.

Now that I'm used to working with the big pots, I really like them. They don't desiccate as quickly as the 34 cm pots, so it's easier to keep up with irrigation.  I would really like to get my plumbing issues taken care of before the rains come...I've got a buried pipe out there that's leaky and I need to find the leak and fix it before that area goes underwater again. It's a hundred foot run past a lot of big pines, so the digging isn't easy...lots of thick roots to chop.

As soon as I get the rest of my big pots planted and producing food, digging up that piping is next on my list.