In a Lower Alabama summer, the heat is almost unbearable by mid-day.
Lately I’ve been getting up at 5:30, grabbing a cup of coffee, and heading out to the nursery to do some work before the sun comes up and turns the world into a sauna.
That has worked well, though I didn’t manage to do it this morning.
This was because I was up late last night watching a movie on St. Bernadette with the kids. I think that’s a good excuse, but it doesn’t get plants potted on Monday.
On Saturday we harvested the rest of the grain corn, the rest of the watermelons, and our potatoes.
I don’t think we’ll bother with potatoes again, unless we find out some new information on how to grow a decent harvest here. We planted 200lbs of seed potatoes… and it looks like we only harvested maybe 250lbs of potatoes. I have to check my numbers again, but they were quite poor. We got small potatoes in sad quantities, despite fertilizing and hilling. We should have gotten at /least/ 1,000lbs of potatoes, which still would have been a poor yield commercially.
As for the corn, it did decently. It’s a landrace project and was not fed well, so we didn’t expect amazing yields. We did get some good-looking ears on some plants, though. Probably yielded a 5-gallon bucket of kernels total.
The watermelons outperformed this year. We pulled in another 25 or more on Saturday. I will have final numbers on the weight and quantity once my son finishes weighing them all today.
We also harvested the “zombie” pumpkin patch, where we grew pumpkins that were a cross of a black Grenadian pumpkin with our compost pile Seminole pumpkin line.
Weird!
After harvesting everything, I bushhogged all the vines, weeds, grass, corn-stalks etc. to clean up the field plots. I may throw some sunn hemp out there as a cover crop to improve the ground for next year – or perhaps a sack of black-eyed peas.
Next year it will be fun to do again. Having the tractor to till up large spaces has worked well, even if it’s a luxury.
