Really new potatoes

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New potatoes forming

Pulling up some volunteer potatoes growing in close and competitive with some winter squash, I was mildly startled by this bright white activity among the roots. They’re the runners that head out to find a little clear spot to form new tubers—really new new potatoes. Can’t recall seeing them before, probably because this is the first time potatoes have turned up as weeds.

Of course, there is an explainer story. The runners, called stolons, are actually underground stems, totally apart from the roots. Along with the tiny tubers, they’re practically pure potato starch, creating storage for what is the plant’s fuel, and continuation of the plant’s life. The little pod tubers already have eyes, but they stay tiny and invisible to us. The tubers keep growing until they hit their genetic max size, or the leaves start dying off and there’s less starch. Then they form a protective skin to preserve the eyes and starch and wait out winter. When conditions feel right, the eyes start to grow, and eventually sprout into new plants.

If you put the stolons and baby tubers above ground in the light, they’d soon start turning into regular stems, stop storing and start using their starch, and try to push out leaves. I’ll trust the textbooks on this, don’t feel the need to see for myself at the moment…

So really, planting seed potatoes, not actual seed, means it’s all one continuous potato, year after year, as long as you keep planting some of its tubers. It’s vegetative propagation—just like garlic, but with a lot more to see. Pretty cool!

Flashback: 2017

Cutting greens

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Harvesting salad greens: bin, harvest knife, hands. This has never been one of my favorite things to do—doubled over one 50′ bed after another. A while back, we made a seat on wheels that straddled the bed so you could sit, pushing yourself back with your feet. It worked pretty well, but it became one extra thing to lug around and faded out of service. The greens—lettuces, arugula, mustard, mizuna, other brassicas—at this time are maybe the best of the season, growing before full summer heat. In the background, the goldenrod, native residents of the field, are thriving, towering over all the crops. I don’t think of them as weeds, because they don’t

Melons in training

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Melons starting on trellis

Melons have been out from under row cover for a couple days now, and seem fine. They look a little more vibrantly green in the photo than they do to me. It’s been weeks now of more cloud than sun, and none of the crops have the deep green, raring to grow look so far. But hot sunny days are forecast. I moved the vines to lean on the twine so they can head up. The tendrils haven’t figured it out yet. Those little yellow spots on the one leaf at the bottom left are maybe some sort of bacterial attack. Being out in open with good fresh air circulation will hopefully keep that from spreading. I’ll remove the leaf if it gets worse.

Since I don’t use pesticides, other than occasional plant soap spray, it’s really up to the plants to do their thing. The row cover as cucumber beetle protection worked, although using heavier cover made it more humid under there, perhaps promoting the bacterial spots. Giving them something to climb improves air and keeps them off wet ground. I try to be helpful, without getting in the way! :)

Basic tomato cage

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Basic tomato cage

Ran into these cheapest of tomato cages in town, two bucks a pop, so I picked up a few. They’ve been around unchanged since I started growing veg over a couple of decades ago: three hoops flimsily spot welded to three support legs. Can’t speak for every last use, but from first-hand field tests, they’re pretty useless—a nice, neat-looking gesture to being in control when the toms are tiny, but prone to sag or tilt or snap at the joints under the weight of grown plants. Not great for a home veg garden, and really not for any sort of tiny production quantities. So why bother now? Well, one can always hope and dream. Since these toms went in late, given our short season, and the small number of plants, I can imagine carefully tending them—suckering enough to keep them productively compact, harvesting regularly before they get heavy. Plus, they take literally 30 seconds to place, and, at first at least, they look kinda cool and organized. Like a Jetsons garden. We’ll see how it goes!

Layers of protection

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Row cover & netting protecting cabbage

Layered protection for beds of cabbage and cauliflower. First, row cover for the flea beetles, who are out in force as usual. Loosely laid on top, deer netting, that doesn’t actually work for deer (it didn’t for the deer around here) but will hopefully deter the groundhogs. The net could easily be chewed through, but it’s springy, tensile tough and very easy to get tangled in. That may be enough!

Box elder regrouped

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Box elder starting to engulf work table

[From 15-Jun-2026] There’s definitely a kind of cheerful dark humor in the relentlessness of it all. When you settle in and observe, the calm and peaceful veggie garden is in a constant push-and-pull of competition and ways to get what they want. Everything’s hungrily chomping, from microorganisms in the soil, all the way to the deer who are hopefully getting zapped by the electric fence (it keeps them on their toes!). Weeds and crops sneak their solar panels to the front, trying to hoard light. The plants, the animals, the powdery mildew, you name it, they all just want to eat and grow, and they have no problem clearing each other out of their way. Wow! But maybe it’s not a battle royale, it’s a wondrously vast, seamless balancing act that can’t be properly described with words. Relax. Don’t overthink. Enjoy the invasive box elder, brutally cut back a couple of weeks ago, regrouped and now trying to eat the work table. Once again.

Birds 2 – Beans 1

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Bird damage on bean plants

The first small bed of green beans was coming up fine—then I lapsed for a moment, and the beans were mercilessly attacked. So it goes in the rough-and-tumble world of the country veggie garden. I suspect birds. Can’t be sure but I’m pretty sure. I’ve seen them in action before. The ragged tops of the stems seem to point to pecking action, not the clean angled slice of creatures with teeth.

Instead of seed leaves, beans emerge with the actual bean split in two right on top of the stem, like an irresistible treat on a stick. Not sure what sort of garden raider survival strategy that represents. I usually put out anti-bird measures: inflatable scare balls or aluminum pie plates suspended on string. Or toss on some row cover—the duct tape of the garden—until a few leaves develop.

Here I didn’t act as soon as I saw the first signs of emerging beans. Also, I’m not used to hand-seeding and probably got a little too precise and seed-saving. With a seeder, plenty of seed drops, so there’s room for thinning, even by birds. Unforced human errors!

Anyhow, there are still enough plants for a decent first harvest, and a bigger bed is seeded and underway, with pie plates heading to the field. Bonus quarter point for the beans—you can see a tiny new leaf on one of the bare stems as it goes for a comeback!

The puddle returns!

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Puddle reappears after heavy rain

After a pretty impressive inch and a half (3.75 cm) of overnight rain, my water table indicator puddle is back. Not usual this far into June, but there has been a lot of falling water recently. You can see the water in the tamped down route of my path to the veg field, but it also extends into the grass on both sides. A mini-Everglades. If the veggies were planted right here, it would be a problem: plants breathe through their roots, so they’d be spluttering for air, in danger of drowning! Luckily, the veg patch starts not far off, but up a gentle slope, so, pretty much high and drier. With the clouds and rain of this May extending into June, and a few days of a heat wave-ish break, the weather pattern of the last 20 years holds true—there is no pattern!

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