Pulsegleaner's Garden 2019; The Uphill Battle

[flowerbug]

i've not heard of that kind of thyme before. for some reason the lemon thyme has been difficult to grow here, but i suspect a lot of that had to do with the fact that it was mixed in with or invaded by chives which took over...

as for nature/wild animals. the 6ft fence i put up last year and some of the new fence i put up this year was run over and through or dented a few nights ago by deer. must have been several large ones because they trampled it enough to get through. i thought the poles were tall enough to hold it all up, but now i see i'm going to need some extensions to hold the upper part up there so they can't do that again.

and when you think that deer won't eat onions, well, one decided the other evening to try to sample the bunching onion flower tops and took a bite out of one of them. it didn't eat any more but it did try... get a herd of young deer all taking samples like that and you can still lose so called deer proof plants.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

i've not heard of that kind of thyme before.

It's a really, really distant member of the genus (so distant in fact, that some taxonomists put it in its own genus, Cordiothymus.) Imagine a thyme taste mixed with black pepper and turned up until it was nearly painful and you have some idea of the flavor.

Part of what makes it so hard is that the leaves are so tiny and so silvery that it's actually hard to tell if the plant is alive or dead without touching it. Makes telling if you are watering it right rather difficult.

 

[flowerbug]

hardy in the south, but not up here... i suspect that if you have an issue with growing it in the southern states it might be that it is kept too wet so i doubt you can kill it easily by letting it get on the dryer side of things. but i don't know for sure.

on the wet side of things we grow plenty of lavender here which is supposed to like a drier climate. we just perch them in raised areas and they do fine for the most part - all this rain we've had is making some of the smaller plants that are starting in the limestone mulch turn yellow. i don't think i'd notice if they didn't make it. we have way too many plants as it is...

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Jul 3

Downside. The Fava appears to have disappeared (how something could eat it from UNDER a buried cage I don't know)

Other than that, things look GREAT, The herbs have all taken the plants are at least twice as big as they were when I last looked and the peppers and the potatoes are even getting flowers!

 

[Trish Stretton]

If your potatoes are flowering, now is the time to make sure they get hilled up if not already done and water them from the bottom,not overhead....but not drowned either.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

I'll try my best, though trying to hill up potatoes that are in a pot may be tricky (they are wild potatoes and a lot smaller than the conventional kind)

 

[Ridgerunner]

You probably know this. Regular potatoes (not sweet potatoes) tend to make potatoes at or above the level of the seed potato. Hilling them up gives them room to grow and be protected from sunlight, which can ruin them. It also makes them easier to dig if they are in a hill. Some varieties will produce all along the main root if you keep burying it, some don't. Several years back someone on here had a pretty impressive photo of potatoes raised like that. I could be wrong but they may have raised them in a stack or tires. As the plant grew they stacked another tire and filled in with dirt, compost or mulch. To harvest they knocked the stack or tires over. Other people tried that with other varieties and it did not work.

I have no idea how your wild potato in a pot will work out. I'll be looking forward to your results.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

There is also the fact it started from potato seeds, there WAS no seed potato.

To be honest, if I get an tubers at all I'll be happy. I certainly am not counting on a bumper crop from a potted plant (it's only in a pot for the same reason most of my plants are; anything put in the ground here without cage protection is immediately eaten). Nor am I counting on anything BIG enough to make eating worthwhile (S. acuale tubers are supposed to top out at golf ball sized).

I'm not even wholly sure any of the plants roots have spread past the original peat pellet I sowed the seeds in (everything seems to radiate out from there).

And I haven't had great luck with potatoes in pots before. The last time I tried was with some potato seeds from Tom Wagner, and of those only one survived. And THAT one produced no tubers, only flowers and berries (in fact there is a bit of a bone of contention over that plant between me and Tom, as based on it's appearance, I think it wasn't a potato at all, but an American nightshade relative that got into the mix, since the only things different about it an a standard nightshade plant were it's flowers [a bit more bell like than nightshade, not potato like at all] and the berries [bronze instead of black] )

 

[flowerbug]

I'll try my best, though trying to hill up potatoes that are in a pot may be tricky (they are wild potatoes and a lot smaller than the conventional kind)

now i'm imagining a sack of potatoes on a motorcycle with the sign "Born to be Wild" on them...

what brings this to mind is riding with my friend on his bike and him telling me to pretend to be a sack of potatoes.

 

[Trish Stretton]

ahem, lol, a few sheets of newspaper draped around the top of the pot might help.
Too many flowers and no fruit tends to indicate over feeding and/or not enough water. You want to not feed til they are flowering if at all and once they do start flowering, water well, pots dry out quite quickly.
Hopefully there are holes in the bottom of the pot....