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Post by heavyhitterokra on Mar 16, 2022 20:23:39 GMT -6
Picking okra is a hot, miserable job. I always go shopping in 2nd hand stores in winter or in early spring and buy long sleeve white shirts for the garden. In summer, I wear those along with a good pair of jersey gloves to pick my okra. I usually try to pick my okra around 6:00 am while it's still cool enough outside to be wearing a long sleeve shirt, but it sometimes takes me until 11:00 am to decide to stop for the day. There are some days that I've picked for 4 hours in the morning, then 4 more hours in the evening, lasting sometimes until 11:00 pm with a head lamp on.
So far, my record for the day has been 175 pounds of okra on a Friday, for the Farmers Market on Saturday morning. What's incredible is that people actually buy that much okra in one day.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Apr 17, 2022 14:03:37 GMT -6
I’ve been noticing the past couple of days that many of my Adirondack Blue Potato plants are setting buds. Nothing has flowered yet, but it’s just interesting to me to see. I have to admit that I think potato flowers are pretty, so I’ll be happy if they start blooming. There may be one or two buds on the Yukon Golds but not many. I don’t think I have seen any on the Red Norlands.
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Post by june on Apr 17, 2022 15:10:49 GMT -6
Here are my Adirondack Blues from 2020. I grew a few of them again last year, but did not plan to grow this year--seems I have some anyway (just a few)--there scragglers coming up that I missed when I dug last year. Apparently, they were deep enough that they withstood the winter without freezing.
6-07-2020
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Post by june on Apr 17, 2022 15:14:51 GMT -6
6-26-2020
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Post by chrysanthemum on Apr 18, 2022 20:18:23 GMT -6
Those look just beautiful, June. I sure hope I can get some potatoes like that this year. Thanks for sharing your photos.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Apr 21, 2022 17:37:47 GMT -6
Those photos made my day!
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Post by chrysanthemum on May 11, 2022 21:20:32 GMT -6
While I was watering my garden this morning, I saw a red potato poking up from the ground. It didn’t have any green showing, but I decided that instead of reburying it, I would just grab it and find some others to make a dish of new potatoes for our lunch as we were going to be having some leftover mushroom and onion gravy. I had some plants that I had pulled up and reburied a couple of weeks ago when I needed to make room for some cucumbers, and they hadn’t really survived that process, so I gathered what was under their roots, too. Those and a couple of others in the area made for a pound of new potatoes. I boiled them for lunch, and the kids and I really enjoyed mashing them together. The blue (purple) ones turned the servings a lovely lavender, and they were so good with the gravy. I’ll have to be patient to let the others size up.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 25, 2022 17:55:05 GMT -6
Lavender potatoes, what fun that must have been! Thanks, for posting that.
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Post by chrysanthemum on May 26, 2022 14:11:16 GMT -6
We’ve been enjoying the blue potatoes, though they and the red both seemed to have a harder time with our high heat than did the Yukon Gold.
I noticed today while I was filling my ollas that some of the foliage that was dying but not dead has started to put on new flushes of growth. I wonder if that’s from the cooler temperatures in the air and the rain cooling the soil. They had been dying prematurely due to the heat (and severed roots from digging), I think, so I’m encouraged that this my give me a bit more time for the potatoes to fill out in some cases.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Jun 5, 2022 20:15:37 GMT -6
My husband and I harvested about ten pounds of potatoes yesterday. Most of those were the Red Norlands, followed by the Adirondack Blues, and the Yukon Gold was in last place, mostly because they have tolerated the heat better and are still in the garden. There weren’t a lot of good-sized potatoes, but we harvested where foliage was dead or where the potatoes had been dug up by a garden invader. Despite not having the size I would have liked, they still look good, and we’ll enjoy eating them. I’ll hope for some better sized ones in a couple of weeks from the plants that are still in the garden.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Jun 16, 2022 12:02:57 GMT -6
I made some more lavender mashed potatoes last night for supper, and I remembered to take a picture this time. There are a few Yukon Golds mixed in because I was trying to use any potatoes that had damage to them in some way. One thing I noticed is that it’s harder to identify a bad spot on the Adirondack Blues because of their dark skin. That’s part of the reason I made mashed potatoes out of them because I cut the potatoes before boiling them, and it gave me a better opportunity to look for bad spots. I’ve had wire worm damage in them this year. Yuck. The mashed potatoes kind of looked like blueberry ice cream to me, but they tasted just like regular (yummy, homegrown) mashed potatoes.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jun 16, 2022 15:16:39 GMT -6
Those lavender potatoes look awesome! I've got some Kennebec and some Red Pontiac potatoes planted in 250-pound mineral lick tubs this year. I've never tried that before. So far, they look better than the ones in my garden. If that works out, I think it will be a thing I do every year. They make really nice-looking container plants in our backyard and when they die back, they'll be good eating too.
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