Grow Food
by Miranda Sehl
Hopefully you’re finding ways to consume all your garden fresh veggies and making headway with your fall garden! Most people, including myself, start out with just a spring garden. However, with the unpredictability of our current times, you might thank yourself later for starting a fall garden.
I’ve only had the opportunity to have a vegetable garden for the past couple years. I am now living in a place where I’m allowed to have one. I’ve been really enjoying it. I’m deeply researching all the different vegetables and fruits and how they grow, how to collect their seeds and store them for next year.
I am trying to figure out how to be more self reliant, and less of a “truckitarian” (relying on shipments of food to grocery stores). So this year is my first time planting a fall garden. I planted: brussels sprouts, kale, spinach, cabbage, garlic, onions, peas, and I’m going to attempt to overwinter some potatoes (the irish way https://youtu.be/knC
FAWDc6FM Luke Marion, MIGardener) to see what happens.
To plant potatoes the Irish way: you plant in the fall, slightly deeper than you would in the spring. The ground works as cold storage, and when temperatures warm up in spring, the potatoes begin growing earlier. Luke suggests planting larger potatoes with this method, to give them more of an energy boost for growth, much like why you plant larger garlic cloves. In his video demonstration, he planted potatoes that weren’t chetted (sprouting).
My spring planting is still producing and doing well overall. I am experiencing some hardships with a few plants, my later wave of potatoes has been nearly decimated by the colorado potato beetle. The best solution that I’ve found is to just remove them manually, same goes for the Japanese beetle. Unfortunately I didn’t notice what was happening in time, as I’ve never battled the potato beetle before. The slugs seemed to back off when I switched to morning watering. Sadly, I’m still experiencing that white powdery mildew on all my squash plants (zucchini, cucumber, spaghetti squash and esp. butternut squash). I blame the nighttime watering. A solution I’m attempting is to cut off the leaves with the mildew and hope it doesn’t spread to the other leaves. My tomatoes and cucumbers surprised me, the cherry tomatoes seem larger than expected, and my beefsteak and roma are smaller. Some of my cucumbers took a very strange shape but still taste wonderful.
Despite the blight, powdery mildew, I’m still having success so far with the zucchini, cucumbers and butternut squashes. I grew a bunch of different varieties of bean plants, which have all done very well. I wish I had planted even more of them! My favorite plant in my garden is a special type of bean from a 25 year old seed packet of Ripley’s Believe it or Not! bean seeds which my grandmother gave to me. I was astonished that two of the dried beans actually germinated. That plant is finally flowering now and I’m still waiting for any actual beans, but cool nonetheless! The stringless green beans might grow to be 36” long! With proper storage, you can keep seeds for an extraordinary length of time as proven by this test. If I get any bean pods, I’m hoping to collect the seeds to try planting again next year.
I’ve been experimenting with different recipes of pickles. So far my favorite has been the fermented in brine kind, but I would like to try the slow ferment method instead of the quick ferment that I did. I also made my grandmother’s sweet “Refrigerator Pickles,” which should last a full year in the fridge!
Correction to previous column: Luke Marion’s video about growing extra to make up for the loss everyone will undoubtedly experience, it is at this link: https://youtu.be/clvul9wWCYE. I highly recommend that you watch this video!