This site is an archive of ChiotsRun.com. For the latest information about Susy and her adventrures, visit the Cultivate Simple site.
Thank you for all your support over the years!

I Spy With My Little Eye…

June 15th, 2011

When I was tying up my tomatoes on Monday, I noticed that a few of the plants were blooming. It’s always exciting to start seeing the lovely yellow flowers on the tomato vines. So far, only a few of the plants are blooming, the rest look like they’ll be blooming in a week or two.

I also noticed that I had a few tiny tomatoes on my ‘Tess’s Land Race Currant’ tomato. These were planted because I figured a tomato this small should provide early tomatoes for salads. I may have been right, we’ll see how long these take to ripen up.

I won’t be eating a ‘Brandywine’ anytime soon, but it looks as though I’ll be eating a tiny tomato in early July!

How’s your 2011 tomato season coming along? blossoms, fruit, harvesting any ripe tomatoes yet?

Growing Sweet Potato Slips

June 14th, 2011

Last winter I found some ‘Hawaiian Sweet’ purple sweet potatoes at the farmer’s market. I purchased a few, some to eat and some to use for growing slips. I cooked a few for eating, they were good – much different in taste than a regular sweet potato. They have more of an earthy flavor than the regular sweet potato flavor.

This spring I put a few of them in water to start growing my slips. Starting your own sweet potato slips is quite easy. All you have to do is place sweet potatoes vertically in a jar of water and wait. You want the bottom of the potato in the water and the top out of the water. Ideally you want at least 2 inches of the potato out of the water. Use some of the nicest potatoes from the previous year’s crop, none that are shriveled. Place the jar in a warm spot, sweet potatoes prefer warmth since they’re tropical plants. Change the water occasionally to keep it fresh.
grow your own sweet potato slipsOnce the vines are about five inches long pick them off and put them in water. One potato will produce a lot of slips. You can keep pinching them off and more should form. They’ll sprout roots quickly and you can plant them in the garden when the soil warms. Around here that means around the first of July. There’s no need to hurry to get them in the soil early as they’ll languish if the temperatures are too cool, especially at night. Ideally you want to start your slips about 12 weeks before planting outside.

I didn’t think these potatoes were ever going produce slips, they sat in their jar of water for about 6 weeks. Just about the time I was going to compost them I noticed a few little buds forming. I have since read that purple sweet potatoes take much longer to sprout. I’ll be planting these along with a few other heirloom varieties that I purchase from Sand Hill Preservation. Let’s hope we can keep the voles out of them this year!

Do you grow sweet potatoes in your garden? What variety does well for you?

Plant Spotlight: Goat’s Beard

June 13th, 2011

Four years ago I purchased a few tiny white Goat’s Beard (Aruncus dioicus) plants for my garden. I planted them in the side garden waiting to get a spot ready for them in one of the borders. Last year when we put in the garden pond, I decided they would be quite lovely growing behind it. It’s in full bloom at the moment and stunningly beautiful, drawing my attention to it whenever I’m in the front yard.

Goat’s Beard or Bride’s Feathers as it’s also known, is a flowering perennial that will be 3-6 feet tall and 2-4 foot wide when mature. It is native in the Eastern portions of the United States as well as parts of Europe and Siberia. It prefers light shade and moist soil and will grow in zones 3-7.

It blooms beautifully in May/June with big white feathery blossoms that look a lot like astilbe. I love the way it looks at dusk, the big white blossoms glow along the dark woodland edge. It seems to attract a lot of small native pollinators while it’s blooming. The foliage is attractive even when it’s not in bloom. I like to leave the dried blossoms on it to add some interest.

Goat’s beard is also available in dwarf forms if your garden is small. It’s definitely a worthwhile plant to look into incorporating somewhere in your garden, especially if you live in the Eastern portions of the US where it would be right at home in a native border.

Any great plants that you’re loving in your garden at the moment?

Quote of the Day: Christy Bartlett

June 12th, 2011

“You can’t be lazy. It’s up to you to see and see something new, to sustain your interest in the world around you. It’s not up to the world to entertain you. It requires effort to be interested.”

Christy Bartlett – found in The Wabi-Sabi House: The Japanese Art of Imperfect Beauty


Sometimes all it takes is looking under a leaf to find something new and exciting. I find gardening to be endlessly interesting. The more I learn about nature the less I realize that I know or understand about it. I’ve looked at wild daisies hundreds of times and earlier this week I picked some for the kitchen table and found these lovely beauties on the underside of one of the leaves.

Things like this always amaze me. These tiny little bronze/gold pearlescent eggs are perfectly formed. I think they’re leaf footed insect eggs, but I’m not positive. I’ll definitely spend some time looking these up. (here’s the post with the images of what hatched out of these lovely eggs)

What has piqued your interest lately?

Garlic Scapes

June 11th, 2011

I’ve been keeping an eye on my garlic watching for the scapes to appear. It’s amazing how one day you check and there’s nothing, then the next they’re curling out of the middle of the plant. Not all garlic produces scapes, from what I read only the hard neck varieties do, so don’t be worried if yours doesn’t.

I have read that harvesting the scapes will produce larger bulbs, this has been my experience. The first year I grew garlic I harvested some scapes and left some. The bulbs were much larger on the plants I had harvested scapes from. It makes sense as the plant doesn’t expend energy into the production of the flower instead using it to grow a large bulb.

Garlic scapes are quite delicious, they don’t have the assertive garlic flavor of the bulbs so you can eat them as a side dish or use them in other dishes. They’re quite good sauteed or grilled. If you’ve never had them before treat them like you would asparagus. My favorite way to enjoy them is in stir fry. This week it was ginger venison stir fry with those golden peas (I’ll share my recipe next week). I’m thinking this coming week I may make pasta carbonara with garlic scapes.

Do you grow garlic? Do you harvest scapes?

About

This is a daily journal of my efforts to cultivate a more simple life, through local eating, gardening and so many other things. We used to live in a small suburban neighborhood Ohio but moved to 153 acres in Liberty, Maine in 2012.

Admin