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Post by heavyhitterokra on Apr 1, 2019 0:28:59 GMT -6
I got 50-pounds of really nice looking Kennebec Potatoes planted last Friday, before the rains and cold weather. The Farmers' Co-op in Tahlequah had them on sale, 50-pounds for $25.00 which was not a bad price at all.
Hopefully, I was able to capture some of last week's heat in the ground, by leaving my furrows open to the warm sun all day before dropping my seed potatoes in at dusk and covering them that evening.
I got about 500' feet worth of rows planted. It was too wet to plow on Saint Patrick's Day; the day when I usually plant potatoes, so I had to wait eleven days more, for better conditions, but I did finally get it done.
I ought to be able to harvest sometime in mid-July.
This is what I used to till in my amendments. I tilled in 560 pounds of Pelletized Lime, 2,500 pounds of seasoned chicken litter, 100 pounds of Austrian Winter Pea and Winter Wheat seed crop that I've been growing since last Autumn, and a ton of composted leaf litter. You can see some of the leaves still falling out of my tiller tines in this photo. My grandma Fannie would have been proud of these straight furrows... She gets all the credit, because it was my grandma who taught me to lay out a straight line and how to follow it. Grandma laid her furrows with a mule until she was in her mid-40s. Since about 2013 or so, I've had the luxury of using a tractor ... I might post a photo below, of how we were still doing things around here up until 2012 though. I laid these furrows off with two stakes and a hoe, then followed my hoe marks, by lining them up with the row guide, stamped into the hood of my Massey Ferguson Tractor. Man, was I ever tired by the time I got all those furrows filled in by hand, using a hoe! I was ready for some dinner, and a long, hot bath after all that. I sure am glad for my tractor! My work is a lot easier now, but sometimes I really miss the sound of trace chains dragging on the dirt and the smell of freshly plowed, Spring soil. Now, all I hear is a noisy engine and all I get to smell is diesel exhaust. There was a real connection with the earth, using the mules and the garden ponies ... I miss that feeling. I do have to admit though, I don't miss the busted knuckles, sore toes, and swelled up shins, from getting kicked, bit, or stepped on, by some ornery old mule.
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Post by macmex on Apr 1, 2019 6:55:05 GMT -6
Looks beautiful Ron! My rows are always curved
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Post by meandtk on Apr 1, 2019 9:07:29 GMT -6
Lookn good!
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Post by john on Apr 8, 2019 5:36:29 GMT -6
NIce! I love to see the tilled soil and the long straight row. Ron, you need a hiller/furrower for your tractor to cover all those potatoes. LOL . That is a lot of work by hand. I just planted my leftover potatoes from last year. ( I had about 100 pounds left) I may buy a bag of seed potatoes and do a later planting also. What variety's of potato does well for you in Oklahoma?
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Post by macmex on Apr 8, 2019 12:39:17 GMT -6
John,
Ron can still reply, but I'll drop in to say that we have all the standard potato varieties here: Red LaSoda, Yukon Gold, Kennebec, Red Pontiac, Chieftain, etc. I always put out some of the reds, as they are very dependable. My wife and I do more Kennebec than anything else, just because of the really large harvests.
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Post by john on Apr 11, 2019 8:49:12 GMT -6
George, I really like the Kennebec's too. They are dependable and yield large potatoes that can resist tough conditions.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Apr 29, 2019 19:18:18 GMT -6
Red LaSoda, Red Pontiac, and White Kennebec are what I usually plant, but this year, I didn't plant any red potatoes. The potatoes I planted in March are about 6" to 8" inches tall now and really look good against all that freshly tilled soil. I planted a full 150' foot row of Heavy Hitter Okra today and planted 72 Early Girl tomatoes, three days ago, on Saturday. The Heavy Hitter Okra puts on pods 55 days after germination, the Early Girl Tomatoes put on tomatoes 55 days after transplanting, and the potatoes ought to be ready to harvest about the first week or so, in July. I'll probably get my first harvest of each right around the same time. It was pretty muddy out there, trying to get any decent photos. New Potato plants sure look good before any Colorado Potato Beetles get here to start chewing the leaves off. One of the secrets to growing decent size potatoes around here is to plant them good and early, so they can get some leaves going before the CPB show up, but it was too muddy to plant early this year, so I'll have to take whatever I can get. As you can clearly see in the first photo above; Plowing a straight furrow does no good, if you can't drop your seed potatoes in a straight line.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 12, 2019 20:04:45 GMT -6
My Kennebec Potatoes are really enjoying this cold snap. They are also benefiting from a very light load of Colorado Potato Beetles, because of cold weather and heavy rains. I walked out 500' feet of potato rows this evening and only found three Colorado Potato Beetles and two clusters of their bright orange eggs. It sure feels good to squish those egg clusters, knowing I've killed several dozen potential CPBs! My potatoes are loving this cold snap and all this rain! It won't be long now! I see blossom heads forming on several plants already. I can hardly wait for new potatoes and green bean time! It won't be long until our Sunday dinners begin to liven up with some fresh garden veggies.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 23, 2019 22:29:37 GMT -6
My potato plants are really blooming like crazy today! Unfortunately, so are the Colorado Potato Beetles. I'll have my hands full picking these things tomorrow... Literally full, as I am Certified Organic, I'll be picking these 500 foot rows of CPB by hand.
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Post by john on May 30, 2019 5:32:35 GMT -6
I remember my grandfather going through his rows every day, picking potato beetles off and dropping them in a jar. Their is now a strain of Bacillus thuringiensis (BT) that is supposed to work on Potato beetles if you start to feel like you are losing the battle.
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Post by john on May 30, 2019 5:47:42 GMT -6
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 30, 2019 9:54:21 GMT -6
Thanks, John.
I appreciate the contact information. I've read about that stuff before, (BT), as they called it, but I have yet to try it. Very interesting concept though. I'd like to give it a try.
(BT) was recommended during the Great Grasshopper Plague of 2012, but the entire Countryside was so overtaken by them, that it became useless to attempt fighting them.
We used to go out every night, with flashlights and catch a couple of pounds of grasshoppers by hand. On George's advice, we moved up to the Big League and wired power to the garden, so we could suck up grasshoppers with a 5-gallon wet-vac. That made containment less of an issue; when the wet-vac got full, all you had to do was suck up some water to kill everything inside it, then dump the grasshoppers out for the chickens to eat.
Unfortunately, more grasshoppers would just migrate from the neighbor's pasture the next night and you could not tell you had even made a dent in their population.
I froze some, one night and counted them later, on a fishing trip. We had caught a little over 3,000 grasshoppers that one night alone. By mid-summer, neither chickens nor fish would eat a grasshopper, dead or alive. So, I resorted to burying them to keep down the stink. Being certified organic is a tough business that way.
I do have part of a bottle of Pyganic-Pro left though. I had forgotten about that. Pyganic-Pro is made of Chrysanthemum Oil. It smells a lot like doughnuts frying when you spray it.
It's a contact organic insecticide that doesn't actually kill the bugs, it just causes paralysis and they fall off, unable to climb back up the stalk and eventually die ...
In my dreams anyway. I don't exactly know what happens to them after they fall off. They might just crawl home and invite their friends back over, with the wonderful news of the awesome bong party they just attended.
The Pyganic runs about $50.00 per pint, it's like fighting off bugs with a cheap bottle of Dom PĂ©rignon. I only use that stuff as a last resort.
I haven't been back to the garden this morning since the torrential rains stopped. I'm thinking the heavy downpour may have knocked them all off the plants? Now, I have a good reason to suit up in a pair of rubber boots to got out there to find out.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 31, 2019 22:03:59 GMT -6
I was right about my hunch that the heavy rains might have washed all the Colorado Potato Beetles off of the potato plants. When I went looking for them today, there was not a single CPB left on the entire 500' feet of potato rows I have.
No doubt, they are still lurking around the bottom of the plants, but for today, at least, there were none of them visible among the potato leaves.
Maybe, by tomorrow, things will dry up enough to actually get down on one knee and investigate the lower end of the plants to see how many bugs have survived.
Hopefully, tomorrow, I'll be able to do some much needed tilling and hilling of the dirt around my potato vines. So far though, it has been too wet to do any tilling for several consecutive days (I lost count after the first 10 muddy days in a row).
Tomorrow, Saturday, June 1st, 2019 is forecast to be the last day of sunshine for the next several days. I hope I use it wisely.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jun 4, 2019 11:48:20 GMT -6
My Kennebec Potatoes are growing like weeds right now. The heavy rains washed away most of the Colorado Potato bug larvae. This much top growth concerns me, as I can't help but wonder if they are putting more energy into growing dense foliage than they are putting into growing potatoes.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jun 7, 2019 20:08:50 GMT -6
Today is June 7th, still, no Colorado Potato Beetle larvae to be seen. I don't know if the heavy rains drowned them or what, but they are still gone. I walked out the entire patch this evening before dark and only found 4 adult CPB total.
If they are that easy to get rid of, maybe I need to try a pressure washer on them in the future?
It has been an interesting observation. I saw more CPB on my tomato plants tonight than I did on my potatoes. I think the tomato cages probably provided some shelter from high winds that accompanied the rains. I see lots of big trees with tops broken out down by the garden, so I know we had some really high winds. One of the trees was a wild cherry, about a foot in diameter at the break. It was loaded with wild cherries, so it was pretty top heavy.
Staking my tomato cages with crossed Tee posts on both ends and a cable stretched at 5' feet really provided strong support this season. All I had to do was straighten a few of them back up where the cages were leaning a little at the top.
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