First butterfly visitor of the year

First butterfly visitor of the year. (Click to see more detail.)

Anyone know what kind of butterfly this is?  With the camera picking up details my eyes couldn't catch, it almost looks a little mothy.  (Side note: The plant he's sitting on is a flowering bok choy. True story!)  He and his buds were as eager as I was to get out in the sun after these last few days of clouds and rain.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm absolutely ecstatic about the rain -- all 1.96 inches of it that fell on my yard. I'm just equally enamored by cool, sunny afternoons. We don't have too many more of them left this year before the heat really turns on to bake. I can't help but revel in the temperature today.

Despite the perfect weather to be out in the garden, I'm holding off until after March 15th before planting my tomato, cucumber, and zucchini transplants. (I really do need to get a post up about them!) Austin's average last frost date is March 15.  Although I'm eager to see if I can grow a significant amount of tomatoes this year, I've been nurturing these plants since they were seeds on January 1st. I have to keep reminding myself that they are warmer weather plants. I certainly don't want to throw away all that time, love, and energy because of a little impatience!

Invasion of the Mosquito Hawks !

Just like the Marfa lights, mosquito hawks can be
tricky to catch in action.

It started a couple weeks ago. I found one or two of these flying bugs near the front door under the porch light. No problem.  Later that week one was bobbing around the kitchen windows (on the incorrect side). I know they're harmless, so I ignore it.  Then, with a turn of my back and the weekly calendar, mosquito hawks are *everywhere*! Soaking up the rays from the front porch light. Spa'ing in the bathroom by my 10x mirror. Bobbing above the artichoke plants like daytime Marfa lights.

I swear I've never seen so many as I have this winter, and while we've had a milder winter than usual, it's still too cold for mosquitoes. So as I sweep up their deceased carcasses from my window panes, I wonder.  What the heck are they eating?

This crane fly was trapped in my greenhouse. Sorry,
there's nothing to scale. Wingspan is about 2 inches.

Turns out, not a lot. First of all, mosquito hawks in Texas don't eat mosquitoes. (Just wishful thinking on our part.) The nickname comes from the fact that ours look a heck of a lot like mosquitoes, only bigger. In Florida I knew them as daddy long legs, but because spiders eek me out more than mosquitoes, I gladly switched nomenclatures. Turns out, these flying insects are actually a type of crane fly.

Crane flies are a beneficial garden insect, but their benefits wear off once they reach adulthood. In their youth, they eat decaying matter and help break down dead plants in your backyard.  In their adulthood, all 1 to 2 days of it, they look for mates by bobbing around like drunken June bugs.  They don't really eat as adults and they don't bite or transmit disease, so no need to panic when they get indoors. But alas, no need to try to rescue them either. They're like house flies in that they can see your hands coming a yardstick away, and there's no convincing them that you're just trying to help. I do feel a little bad that my house lured so many of these garden beneficials astray, but Nature has already planned ahead by sending us such a bumper crop this year.

Check out the Department of Horticultural Resources at Texas A&M for more info about the crane fly.

OMG! Cauliflower!

Cauliflower peek-a-boo

My winter garden has been the most productive I've ever had and the weather's been perfect for it. I decided to buy more than the usual number of transplants this year to make sure that I had something to harvest. It worked.  I had 6 collard greens, 6 kale plants, 6 broccoli plants, and 6 cauliflower plants all growing through our mild winter.  We only hit below freezing once this year and even though those the kale looked like sullen teenagers the next morning, they all perked up again by the afternoon.

I was keeping an eye on the cauliflower heads especially, and when they got big enough, Dan and I went around tying the leaves up with rubber bands to shield the heads from the sun. Then about a month ago, we had a particularly warm day in January, and I noticed that the heads were already starting to separate like they do before going to flower.  Well, I had no choice but to cut four of them down and then figure out what to do with them.

The heads weren't terrible big, compared to the supermarket. They wouldn't win any prizes in perfection, either. But dang if they didn't look gorgeous in this large colander. Bonus: They tasted quite a bit like cauliflower, too.

(I love the colors in this shot. Some of the white cauliflower did get a little violet from exposure to the sun, but just along the edges.)

So what do you do when you have too much cauliflower to eat right away? You give it away, of course! But I didn't. Screw that.  We're only talking four heads here, not twelve loaves and fishes. Instead I decided to pickle them using a recipe I found in a Christmas present from my sister-in-law. It's curry based, and more importantly, I had all the ingredients on hand. Even though I knew that everything would turn out a yellow, I still went ahead and separated the heads by color.

 

The florets were not as crisp as the textbooks would tell you they should be, but I'm not pioneer woman and do the best I can with my hours. I ended up leaving the heads in the refrigerator a couple days before getting the time to can them. I had enough cauliflower for about three and a half pint jars.  I water-bathed three of them and put one in the refrigerator.

 The picture on the left is my attempt at being artsy. Click on it for the full effect!

 The finished product took on some distinctive coloring despite the curry and tumeric in the brine. Notice, as with all my pickled vegetables, that they are floating towards the top of the jar. I can't ever seem to get them to not float after processing. I pack those suckers as much as I dare for fear of breaking the glass jar with my hand in it, but they always soften a little under the heat and take off. The taste is fine but the look is hardly ideal.

(Another note: Cauliflower is a lot tougher to pack than green beans what with all the weird shapes and such.)

Because of the floating, these jars will never win at a county fair competition, but they still are pretty to me.

And for those of you keeping track at home, I told you I had six cauliflowers growing but only canned four. Well, we roasted one that was barely enough side for the two of us. As for the last contestant. Well, check out his picture on the right:

This green cauliflower, in the category of broccoflower, is a romanesco broccoli. He didn't start to rice like the other ones did with the short warm snap, so he'll get a special place on the dining room table this week.

Because cauliflowers only grow one head a season, it was time to pull the plants once the harvest was over. I composted them before later finding out that you could use the leaves and stems in vegetable broth.  Interesting! A project for next year's cauliflower experiment.

I Grew a Watermelon!

With the dismal luck I've had keeping squash plants alive because of that darn squash vine borer, I was really surprised to find a watermelon growing in my backyard.

One of the reasons that I think this plant might have made it while all my summer squash didn't is the fact that the stem of this plant is really, really, prickly. Maybe the squash vine borer moth can't find a comfortable place to lay it's eggs!

Here's a couple of close-up shots of the stem:

Of course, there's more to nature than Cucurbitaceae-killing moth larva. With such a hot, dry summer, the squirrels were particularly adamant about getting at this unique specimen of sugar water.  Despite the daily check-ins on my baby melon, I was surprised when I saw the little imprints of squirrel paws on it. So I covered it with bird netting and stuck lots of intimidating sticks around it.

Once the squirrels noticed that I was protecting that little green blob, reverse squirrel psychology kicked in and they were even more inclined to brave the unstable netting and get their little paws on it.  I eventually made a tent out of chicken wire and winter-weight garden cloth and completely covered the watermelon. It worked pretty well, except when the wind blew it over or I forgot to re-cover it after sprinkler day.

Then one day I noticed that the watermelon was splitting.  I found it hard to believe I could over-water a plant during the hottest summer in Austin, but the split could not be ignored. So I went ahead and picked it, wondering if there would be enough undamaged flesh to even recognize it as a watermelon.

You can see the split on the side that had started to dry out a bit.  The little white divots are squirrel tracks (my best guess). Also note that the top of the melon still maintained the little Dairy Queen curl where the melon had attached to the stem.  I wonder if the fruit had grown bigger if the watermelon would have eventually rounded out to a nice oval?

After cutting away the bad parts, I ended up with enough edible watermelon for two people. And the taste? Incredibly like watermelon. It wasn't too sweet and the texture was firm. I was able to save some of it to enjoy the next day with breakfast. My pride and amazement rekindled.

Unfortunately, that was the only fruit produced all summer on a rather long, gangly vine. I've got another watermelon growing now that's about the size of my fist, but as November is right around the corner, I doubt it will have time to mature.

Next year I think I'll try more watermelon vines. I'll plant them on the shadier side of the tree ring so that the soil near the roots doesn't dry up as quickly during the summer heat and let the vines run roughshod through the herb garden.  So far that watermelon is the biggest fruit or vegetable I've ever grown, and I'm eager to try more of that next year!

Lessons in irrigation systems

It's been a record hot summer here in Austin and the calendar hasn't even hit summer, so I've been spending lots of time fixing up our automatic sprinkler system.  This system has got to be 10 years old if it's a day, and with all old plumbing, tinkering with it is full of risks. Luckily, I know a guy from my old job who freelances in irrigation work and he doesn't mind teaching me as he goes. That said, I still managed to mess things up after he left and had to pay for another trip (and lesson).  So I thought I'd share what I've learned with others in the hope of paying it forward.

First, my main goal was to swap out sprinkler heads that were broken, buried, or otherwise not doing their jobs.  Here's an example of an old head (left) and a new one.

Old head (L) and new head with swing joint (R)

The new heads are bigger than the old and should hold up better over time, especially the internal spring that pops up the nozzle. The head in the picture was replaced because it had cracked near the bottom, causing water to seep out around the head instead of going through the sprinkler. To recognize the problem of a broken head like this, look for a little green circle of grass centered in a large patch of dying lawn. Also, the soil around the head will create the soggiest mud pit ever. Hippos and 2-year olds will enjoy digging these heads out.

New head in a new home

With every head I replace, I add a swing joint.  That's the extra plastic tubing in the picture. The swing joint allows the head to have some flexibility.  If you step on the head or your neighbor's student driver runs over it, the swing joint allows the head to move without breaking. The original head was screwed directly into the main PVC line. This hard-plastic-to-hard-plastic junction easily cracks or snaps if enough pressure is applied. Using swing joints means you have to dig a bigger hole, but they're worth it.

The next lesson is about inline valves.  Irrigation systems are divided into 2 or more zones.   Each zone has a valve with a solenoid that gates the flow of water into the zone. The valve is inline with the PVC that branches off the main water line and has wires connecting it to the controller in the garage. The section valves can be located all in the same box or in individual boxes throughout the yard.  I've only managed to find two of mine so far because the lawn has absorbed the others over the years.  

Valves for zone 4 & 5 at Casa Andromeda

Note: If you don't secure the lid to the valve box carefully enough, your lawnmower will destroy it.

One of the neat tricks that I learned from the irrigation guy on his first trip is that you can turn on the zone from the valve. It saved time being able to turn on the backyard section from the backyard without having to go to the controller in the garage. On page 8 of the document, Tips on Installing and Maintaining  Rain Bird Residential Valves, I found information about the manual bleed on the valve which allows you to turn the section on and off. Unfortunately, the document didn't include pictures with the information, so I missed an important piece. Right under the entry for manual bleed is an entry for manual on/off that mentions turning the solenoid. Since I thought the solenoid was a completely internal mechanism, I considered this advanced instructions and ignored it.

Turns out, I could have saved myself a lot of heartache and a $30 trip from the irrigation guy if I'd found a picture in the manual. Without knowing it, I was turning the solenoid as I was turning the manual bleed on and off and eventually caused the valve to leak.  But the bigger problem was that once I turned on the manual bleed, turning it off didn't seem to shut off the sprinklers. In hind-site, I'm sure it was some combination of manual bleed and solenoid twisting that caused the phenomenon, but at 2pm on a Saturday, I panicked after 5 minutes of water sprinkling out of control, so I ran to the front of the house to turn off the main water line.

That's where I learned another lesson.

I knew where the main shut-off was, but when faced with three knobs to turn, my adrenaline-fueled ignorance flared. I turned all of them off, and thankfully, the sprinklers shut down. Then, gathering my wits, I attempted to turn the water back on. Apparently, I only turned two of the knobs back to open and didn't realize my mistake. When I saw that the water to the house was back on, I expected the sprinklers to work as well. They didn't. I tried turning and un-turning all the knobs and still nothing. In fact, one knob in particular seemed to stop and then spin uselessly. Sweat was dripping into my eyes at this point and my patience was gone. I thought I had broken the main shut-off valve to the irrigation system.  Crapola.

Because I don't naturally engage in proper scientific method, I didn't think to carefully check all three of the knobs in the main shut-off box. For example, had I created a matrix of open and close valves I might have seen this.

Yes, that's a goodly amount of combinations, but at least eventually I would have solved the problem of my creating.  Instead, I came to the conclusion that the whole situation had gotten out of my hands. I had to wait until after the weekend to email the irrigation guy to come over and see what I'd messed up.

The good news is that I didn't break anything in the system.  The bad news was that I just hadn't turned all the knobs back to the on position. Embarrassing. In fact, I had confused the house shut-off valve with the irrigation shut-off valve, so I was focusing on the wrong valve most of the time.  Here's the scoop in pictures:

The irrigation system has a backflow prevention assembly which has a shut-off valve on either side. Next time I need to turn off the main line to the sprinklers, I just need to turn off one of those valves on the bottom.

But here's the thing my irrigation guy chastised me for: using these valves like sink faucets. I was using the inline valve in the back as a matter of convenience, but I should avoid turning off and on the system from either the inline valves or the main valve. Those valves aren't designed to be turned on and off repeatedly. Ironically, the more you use them, the greater the chance that they will fail.

Although my lessons in irrigation systems are far from complete, I feel like my knowledge has jumped a level or two. I've still got some work to do to make the system as efficient as possible and to keep the yard in good shape. Thank goodness for the inch of rain this week and the efficiency of Mother Nature!

A Tale of Tomatoes: From Seed to Salsa in 6+ Months

The day after Thanksgiving I was having kitchen withdrawal symptoms so I decided to spend part of Black Friday making and canning green tomato salsa. The day-long effort was actually the culmination of a six-month experiment in gardening inefficiency. And like a high-school chemistry experiment, I'm writing up the project from memory, about a half-hour before the lab is due.

Tomatoes having the reputation for being fast growers and prolific producers.  Not over a hot Texas summer. Apparently the nighttime temperatures have to get below 75 in order for fruit to set.  Austin seems to have the right combination of heat + humidity to prevent this from happening.  Maybe it's just the type of tomatoes I'm trying to grow.  Perhaps I can try others.  But it's been 2 years of trying and I've gotten bumpkin.

Last year I got disgusted looking at my scrawly tomato plants about September and ripped them out. Then someone told me that if I leave the plants in until it gets cool again (end of September/beginning of October), I'll have tons of tomatoes.  So that what I did this year.

Here's the bounty of tomatoes, all 6.3 pounds of themf

Belated Birthday Addition to the Garden

Even though I have tons of plant/bug stuff to post from this summer's backyard experiments, I'm pre-empting them all to introduce to you our newest member of the garden, Fred.

Fred

Fred is mini-moai.  About 3 feet tall (4 feet including hair).  We set him up in the back right corner of the backyard in the most shade.  He looks a little lonely there now, but eventually we'll find the right combination of plants and rocks to give him company.  Meanwhile, he helps balance the interest in the yard.

I don't know if I can describe how satisfied I am to have him watching over the estate. I've always been a little fascinated by the story of Easter Island. Years ago, when Mom came to visit, I dragged her to the heart of the Texas Hill Country  to visit our version of Easter Island heads.

This Hill Country moai could be Fred's big brother!

Johanna & Mom near Hunt, Texas

Which, for no apparent reason, is also the home of Stonehenge II.

But back to Fred.

So I'd seen him and his compatriots at the Natural Gardener last spring, thought he was cute and told Dan about him in passing.  Unbeknownst to me, while I was at Mom's in Florida, Dan drove down to the nursery to pick him up, but he was gone! Well, when I got home Dan presented me with a beautiful bird bath and told me the sad story.

Unwilling to give up without a good moai because of a missed clearance sale, I drove the 23 miles to the Natural Gardener to see what I could excavate. Despite the fact that these moai pottery did not create the same enthusiasm in the employees as the pottery did in me, I was able to find the stash of leftover moai hidden among the other pots. Huzzah! I got back home to Dan as soon as I could to tell him the news. We packed up the bird bath and traded it in for Fred.

Feel free to stop by and have your picture taken with him.

A Summer of Okra

As you may know, I became a fan of okra a few years ago when I started getting it fresh from the farm and cooking it myself.  Turns out, my fears of the much-touted slime factor were misguided. Same too, my expectations that it had to be deep-fried or nothing. In three years, I've gone from avoiding this vegetable in the kitchen to napping under it's shade in my backyard. Weird. But cool.

In 2008 I got my okra from Johnson's Backyard Garden CSA, and professed my ignorance as to what to do with it. I found out that okra is popular in Indian recipes, and since I wasn't a fan of deep-frying in my kitchen, I gave them a shot. They were freakin' awesome tasting. I made them with each bundle of the lady finger I got form the CSA that summer and fall. The only down side was that the recipes were more involved than I was used to making. Cooking okra took a lot time. Worth it, but not always practical. Sometimes the okra went bad in the fridge before I had a chance to use it. Boo.  I wish I'd thought about pickling then....

So by 2009, I decided okra was a pretty cool vegetable. It also had the distinction of handling our Texas summer heat, so I planted 3 okra plants in my 3x3 foot square-foot garden box. I gave each tiny seedling a whole square foot as was recommended somewhere on the internet. The results: unimpressive, but successful. The plants were plagued by aphids, but the buggers were kept in check by knocking them off daily either with water from the hose or my hand. The little pests didn't seem to hurt the okra that was produced, and we ate it when we could supplement our 'harvest' with the okra from the CSA.  The plants grew about three feet tall eventually and produced maybe 3 okra a week. (Hence, the air-quotes around harvest.) I noticed that the plants, while easily a foot wide, were pretty spindly. I resolved to plant them more densely the next time.

In 2010, I planted 16 okra seeds in my upgraded 4x8 foot square-foot garden. I planted them with corn, squash and peas in a modified, failed three-sisters garden plan. I'd heard that corn needed a lot of fertilizer to be successful, so I began fertilizing weekly with seaweed extract almost immediately. It was my first committed effort to regularly fertilizing since starting my garden experiments. Well, the corn never really produced anything edible and died half-way through the summer.  The okra plants had a different experience, which I'd like show in pictures.

2 feet tall plant, okra next to serrano pepper

4 feet tall plants

about 6 feet tall

I'm guessing 8 feet here

Long story short, I've got some okra plants that are about 8 feet tall now. In the afternoon, I can lay down on my garden storage bench by the fence and daydream through the branches. The one green okra plant has a 'trunk' now that's almost and inch and a half in diameter. The burgundy okra plants are slimmer, as are the fruit the produce, but still impressive (at least to me).

Lessons learned:

• Fertilize your plants often, at least while they're small and not yet setting fruit.
• Aphids only seem like a big problem when the plant is 2 feet tall
• Planting both green and burgundy okra can produce some odd-looking, hybrid fruit. I think I'll stick to just one color next year so I can save seeds
• Okra plants are pretty flexible, even when they're big. If a tropical storm is coming through, I should use stakes to help support them
• Even if a plant bends way over, it can still produce okra
• Plant okra towards the north so that the rest of the box can still get some sun
• Burgundy okra is too long and skinny to be a good pickling okra, as it's too tall to fit in the jars without squishing. Use the green okra from the CSA for that.

Our harvests don't require air-quotes to describe any more. We have to keep picking them every 2-3 days to keep them from getting too big and tough. We've been able to give some to friends and still have enough to enjoy ourselves (we're still getting some from the CSA as well). Our okra recipe repertoire has expanded to included tasty, yet quick side dishes. It's been a summer of okra, and it makes me kinda proud.

Unexpected Gifts from the Rain

So after getting almost 9 inches of rain this week, the grass is crazy long, the fences are still drying out, and there are a few less birds visiting the fountain.  This morning I took a Town Lake walk with M and saw remnants of the flooding there: weed-draped benches, beached docks, and long expanses of muddy muck where the trail used to be. When I got home I took the time to walk around the park in my backyard and see how things were drying out.

The okra plants that had fallen/bent way over under the force of the wind and rain had start to grow in an "s" shape back towards the sky.  I found more twine and posts to force them upright. Then I picked a plate of okra.  Those plants are hardy.

The tomato plant is draped way down over the basil and pepper plants. I have a trip to Lowe's planned today to see if I can find some better supports.  For the record, still not cool enough at night for tomatoes, but I'm not giving up early this year.  I'll keep that plant going until the first freeze before I give up!

There were also a few surprises.  This volunteer didn't look like the usual suspects when I saw it on Thursday, so I let it grow.

Turns out it was a rain lilly, and more popped up in the lawn and herb garden within the next couple days.

Funny that they don't crop up from being watered with the sprinkler.  You definitely need a good soaking before they emerge.  Not sure how they propagate but I'll leave them be where I can so that they have a chance to come again after the next big rain.

Moving on. In the back of the yard near the strawberry patch everything looked normal. Then I thought I saw  a pot of gold coins tipped over near the rosemary. Turns out, the jack o'lantern that I'd dumped by the fence to rot last year had a heck of a lot of seeds.

I doubt they'll grow into anything, but I suppose I should still clean them up.  Or maybe see if the squirrels do...
And finally there were these little surprises sprouting up from dried husks of ancient purple alien flowers.

Artichokes back from the dry dust of summer! The one on the top left is really close to the thyme (upper left corner). I hope the thyme learns to grow northwest because it's going to be fighting for sunlight in another couple months if that artichoke continues to grow. The artichoke sprout from the second plant is not looking as strong, but now that I know it's there, I'm going to make sure to water it regularly.  Hopefully these plants don't need 8 inches of water a week to grow, but it's still exciting to see them after months of nothing.

Tropical Storm Hermine

I went out to check the rain gage this morning and measured 7.92 inches.  This amount is since it started raining on Monday.  I didn't check the gage yesterday b/c I didn't want to get soaked. Lazy science! I didn't even realize we had a tropical system in the area, but I had heard in passing that it was going to rain Tuesday and Wednesday, so I shut off the automatic drip irrigation to the garden.

But 7.92 + inches in three days? I'm a little concerned about root rot in my raised bed now.  If it doesn't rain too much more today, and is able to dry out quickly, perhaps this isn't a big concern.

I hope the pecan tree in front is enjoying this good soaking, though.  It was showing signs of heat stress, according to my amateur research and opinion.  Might not be a good year for pecans (again). Bummer.

Another problem with the rain is falling down plants.  The okra plants were the worse hit.  Most of them were over five feet tall at the beginning of the week and this morning, about half were laying completely on their sides.  The main stem was still pliable and they hadn't uprooted themselves, so I bent them back up and then tied some twine around the whole lot of them.  Now they're squished together in places because it's still raining and I only hastily wrapped them together, but I hope the triage helps. Between me and the rain, a lot of okra blooms are on the ground. Might be the end of okra season for Andromeda this week, but it was a fun ride.

Catching up: Spring review of artichokes, ladybugs, and alien purple flowers

Last year I tried growing some bare root artichoke plants that I got from the Natural Gardener. Although the plants sprouted, they never got very big and died as soon as the heat hit in May. This year I tried again, but planted transplants instead of bare root subjects. Now, perhaps I also paid more attention to them, watering and fertilizing more regularly, or perhaps it was just the breed of plant, but this spring, my two artichoke plants really took off.

(ps that's a baby dill plant in the far, upper left.  More on that guy later)

Though I got the transplants at the same time from the same nursery, the one on the left decided to grow tall and the one of the right decided to grow short. The above picture shows them young and happy.  I found out later that artichoke plants can get pretty ratty as they grow, and require pruning to remove dead/dying leaves  that the roly-polys love to chomp on.

And you know what other bugs love artichoke plants? Aphids!

I sprayed some neem oil on the plants, but by the time I saw these buggers, I thought for sure the infestation would win.  But then I saw a new form of foe.

Ugh! I felt like the worse gardener ever! I was totally powerless to help my plant.  But then, I put aside my panic and did a little research.  Turns out, these guys are 2 different forms of developing ladybugs.

(Sorry. That's the best shot I have of one.)  So the ladybugs had come to munch all the aphids.  Yay! The system works!  Really.  After less then a week I never saw any more aphids on the plants.  I was amazed b/c watching the ladybugs, I never actually saw them eat anything.  In fact aphids would just walk right up to a ladybug and then walk away unscathed.  Well, at least as far as I could see.  Apparently, they were way scathed when I wasn't looking.

And then came the first hints of artichoke.

I was totally stoked. And come to find that a plant can produce more than one artichoke at a time.

In my case, the secondary artichokes were never as big as the first one. Plus, the first one wasn't that big, but it was tasty.

Dan and I had to do some research about how to prepare and eat them (read: Alton Brown cookbook from Christmas) but it was a fun experiment.

Because of the smallish size of the artichokes we were picking, we thought we'd wait longer to see if they would get bigger.  In this case, the just started to flower.  But that's okay too.  As artichoke eating by nature involves a lot of butter eating and it was probably time for us to cut back on that for the spring.  Here's a photo sequence of the flowering:

Overall we got three purple flowers, but the heat is really taking a toll on the plants.  Most of the leaves are yellow and shriveled and the flowers look like someone singed them with a lighter.  I don't know if the plants will survive until next year (it's not likely in texas) but if not, I'll be looking for transplants to grow in 2011. And this time I think I'll give them more room to grow.  They start small but become very big additions to the garden.

Experiments in Potatoes

I bought some frou-frou potatoes a couple months ago. The kind that come in the special burlap bag so that the spuds are fooled into thinking they've never left the ground. These were platinum-members-only potatoes. So I couldn't be surprised when they began to sprout before I had a chance to use them.

But instead of being annoyed at my wasteful spending and inefficient meal-planning, I decided to try to grow them.  I don't have room in the garden for the type of mounding that's recommended, but in my research I ran across the concept of potato grow bags. Unfortunately, I didn't take pictures from the very beginning, but here's a shot from a couple weeks ago:

 

I started out with 2 inches of dirt and laid the cut-up sprouted potatoes on top.  Then, as the plants grew a couple inches, I mounded more dirt on them until the plant was barely showing.  The bag pretty quickly filled up. And the picture this morning looks like this:

 

(Hand is for scale and to show-off a new OPI color I found)

I think now I need to wait until the flowers die off before opening the velcro flap on the backside of the bag and checking for my bounty.  The plants look pretty happy, but who knows what's happening in the dirt?  More to come....