Archive for the ‘News’ Category
If You Love Potatoes — Here is a Cool Picture of Harvest Today from Twitter
From Twitter, 8 September 2009 by @spcochenour -- "Harvesting potatoes. Hoping to get 1500 row feet harvested for storage today. http://twitpic.com/gzbch"
DoT’s Thot: Sometimes I wonder about the farmers and who will be growing our food in the future. When I was a child, I had uncles and aunts and cousins who farmed back in Hawaii — growing banana, truck farming vegetables, hot-housing orchids, and even making charcoal. Gradually that is fading away….
Potatoes Just Being Harvested
If you love potatoes or even merely consume them, haven’t you sometimes wondered about the source and the seasons? I was onTwitter this morning and found this from @spcochenour — “Harvesting potatoes. Hoping to get 1500 row feet harvested for storage today. http://twitpic.com/gzbch“
Long ago, I remember a fellow engineer telling me about growing up in Idaho and harvesting potatoes. He remarked that there was nothing as sweet as a potato fresh from the harvest — crunchy and sweet — that is how he described it — more like an apple….
My Garbage Can Potatoes
I’ve never really grown potatoes — only once did I try that leaky, recycled garbage can trick — more because I was curious — got tiny harvest of tiny taters. It made me appreciate the bags and bins of potatoes I take for granted at the super market.
In the garbage can potatoes approach, you plant the little potato starters in a shallow layer of potting mix and keep adding stuff on top a layer at a time until the potato plants top the can and die off. Finally, when you tip the can over, you can harvest potatoes that have grown out of the stems and rooted — fascinating, but I’ll leave the growing to the experts.
Better Potatoes and Review an Interesting Blog I Read for Fun and Info
Anyhow, seeing Stephen’s tweet drew me over to the picture and gave me a data point — it’s September and a farmer in Colorado is harvesting potatoes. Something is really right when you know that. So, here is his photo and you know how to find him on Twitter.
I also looked at his blog called Field and Table and now that I am blogging about his stuff, I can always go and look to see what’s up over there in Fort Collins. His blog is an interesting read for us backyard gardeners. For example, he markets heirloom tomatoes locally and grow my own, because of the scarcity and cost of those in my local market.
I used to fly out to Denver to work in Aurora periodically and would drive past the sign pointing to Fort Collins. Now I will think of farming, too, when I think of Fort Collins.
I don’t know Stephen (yet), but thought that some of us out there would find his stuff interesting and so I am sharing.
Aloha, DoT
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Scene in Hawaii: Hawaiian Bougainvillea “Dragons”
Bougainvillea "Dragons" Honolulu, Hawaii 5 August 2009
NOTE: DoT has been posting from Honolulu since late July when she left California to help her mother through some medical procedures. She will be doing so until she can return to Orange County.
DoT’s Thots: “A dragon can be unseen or visible, minute or huge, long or short. However,
always it is great.“ — Shuo Wen (ca. 100)
Recently, while taking my mother for a drive in Honolulu, I noticed a variety of bougainvillea that I had not seen before. The branches were long and sinewy and bobbed about in the wind. They seemed magically animated — what a great visual treat.
Long green leaf-scaled “necks” ended in bright rosy pink bracts with tiny tubular embedded flowers. The effect was quite like a number of dragon heads undulating in the wind. I was so entranced with the look that I vowed to go back and get a few pictures.
I have them here for you to see. In the closeup you can see that these are indeed some variety of bougainvillea. When I have a chance, I will track this down at a plant nursery. At the moment, I am deeply engaged in helping mother with her health issues and put further search on the back burner, but could not wait to share the photos. Please enjoy the Hawaiian Bougainvillea Dragons.
Closeup of "Dragon Bougainvillea" 5 August 2009, Honolulu, HI
Aloha, DoT
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Monarch Butterfly Sightings Haiku — the Asclepsis Gardener’s Reward
DoT’s Thot:
Asclepsis Gardener's Reward: Monarch Butterfly
Monarch Butterfly On Asclepsis Plant with Buds
Monarch Butterfly Effect
Busily canning tomatoes today, I looked out the window over my kitchen sink and there it was — flitting around my butterfly bush plant. I felt a little less tired; and instead, happy that the orange-gold, black and white “flutter-by” distracted me from work.
Hope to post by tomorrow or the next day to share with you. Aloha, DoT
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Missed the Monarch Butterfly Chrysalis — Found It Empty
Dot’s Thot: “Just when the caterpillar thought the world was
over, it turned into a butterfly.” –Unknown
Empty Monarch Butterfly Chrysalis
Dot’s Jot:
Quick Note — I had looked and looked for the chrysalis and could not find any. Then in mid-June I saw this one empty chrysalis — not that seafoam/turquoise gold-speckled chrysalis, but the empty pale tan husk that had released its butterfly.
It made sense — I had seen a number of Monarch Butterflies flitting about. I’ll be darned — tell people you are looking and then become optically dense — oh well, next round of butterflies, maybe. I just wanted to capture my own photos. Next, I should have some butterfly pictures.
One thing I know, the caterpillars smartly move away from the asclepsis or butterfly bushes to wrap themselves into their chrysalis hibernation nest. It must protect them from predators to be separated from the butterfly bushes they love. Aloha, Dot
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Grow Tomatoes Journal News: 2009 Late Blight hits East Coast
Roma Tomato Displaying Late Blight Effects
“I don’t say my golf game is bad, but if I grew tomatoes they’d come up sliced” — unknown
Dot’s Thot: If our tomato gardening goofs only “sliced” out tomatoes, we would be in BLT heaven.
I was surfing the net again to learn more about tomatoes and came across this news item about a current tomato disease from The Washington Post today. “Late Blight Comes Early, Hitting Tomatoes Hard, Experts Say“. You can follow the link for the full article. If you are growing tomatoes at home here is my quick summary of the news.
Late blight threatens commercial tomato production and can affect the home grower as well. It is a fungal disease that is the same problem that affected the potato crops in Ireland in the 1840s. That caused a potato famine and was the impetus for one of the large migrations to our eastern seaboard. Both tomatoes and potatoes belong to the nightshade family.
The problem is being reported from Maine to South Carolina and even as far west as Ohio. California was not mentioned — and tomatoes are a huge crop out here. The official name for the disease is Phytophthora infestans and there are pesticide sprays for it. However, for organic farmers, neem oil sprays can be used, but must be reapplied weekly.
Usually late blight appears late in the tomato growing season (April to October, according to the article — though we get our seedlings in March here in southern California). This year, because of the more rain and cold weather than usual, the fungus has appeared early.
To see more pictures to help you identify the disease, the article says to go to the Maryland cooperative extension service blog, Grow It, Eat It, at http://www.growit.und.edu. Go to the site above for the full article and go to the site in this paragraph to see more pictures. If you find plants with the disease, you are to put the plants in a plastic bag, seal it and trash the lot; do not compost as the spores from the fungus will continue to spread.
I went to that recommended site and stumbled upon another useful site called the HGIC Plant Diagnostic Web Site (home page) and their page on Spots/Blotches: Late Blight of Tomato and Potato. I have now put that on my list of useful, horticulturally sound information. They endeared themselves to me even more, since I spotted a thumbnail photo of the Monarch Butterfly Caterpiller in their banner; Monarchs are my favorite butterfly.
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