winter garden: kale

One of the best things about our sun room is that it’s right off the kitchen.  It gets plenty of sun and is about 60% windows.  The bad thing is that it was an addition and has no heating vents.  That said, I think the kale will do well out there.

I started off this spring with 18 kale plants, a combination of curly Winterbor kale and the reptilian Tuscan kale.  Surprisingly, I still have 12 plants which are doing really well, despite bolting and being cut back this summer.  (at the top of the photo are two Jerusalem artichokes… more about those later!)

tiny rootballs for such tall plants!

My research told me that kale keeps very shallow roots, so the plan is to pot them all up and have fresh kale leaves for soups and salads as long as I can.

after a haircut and a potting up

The plants never did very well in the backyard.  There were simply too many pests.  Most of the leaves were completely riddled with holes, so it was difficult to get any significant yields.  Wouldn’t it be funny if the kale flourished in the winter once everything else died back!

out on the stoop to get some sun

Yukon Gold Potatoes in Burlap Sacks

There is so much out there about how to grow potatoes, increase yields by continually burying the stems, and how fantastic they taste compared to store-bought.  The most important thing I’ve learned is that not every variety of potato will benefit from periodic hilling with additional dirt to increase yields.

I chose to grow my favorite, Yukon Gold, which is a determinate variety.  This means that, once the plant emerges from the growing medium, it will produce tubers below that soil line.  All the hilling in the world won’t get you more potatoes, and it might even increase the chance of stem rot.  The only caveat to this is if you start to see potatoes, make sure to cover those up so they don’t come in green and inedible.

I bought one box of seed potatoes from the local Ace Hardware store for $4.  They might have been there for a while, as you can see–they had already started chitting and producing alien tentacle-like sprouts.  For those with more than 2 chits per potato, I cut them in half and let them dry on paper towels for a day.  I shared about 6 pieces with a friend and still ended up with enough to make 4 sacks of potatoes.

Because I started them indoors in mid-March, they had a good head start when they went out into the garden in early April.  I filled each burlap sack with about 6″ of 1:1 top soil and garden soil with Miracle Gro in it, put 3 pieces of potato in each, then topped them with another 6″ of soil.  They need regular watering, so I go out with the hose on days when it hasn’t rained.

Three weeks later, they are thriving propped up against the straw bales I’m conditioning for the melons… but more on that this weekend!