Garden Update - Beans, Potatoes, and Grapes

The hot temperatures lately have signaled its time to pick the dry beans.

Most of them are dried nicely.

Last year when the dried ones got wet, they started to sprout, so we picked after several days of dry heat.



These were fun for picking.

In a few weeks they will dry and split open, spilling the beans.







Many of the potatoe plants were ready to harvest, since some of the spuds had started to "emerge."








We have a great spud-picking crew this year.

We harvested 8 of our plants (the ones needing immediate attention) and ended with 46 lbs of nice spuds.

We will wait for the rest of the crew to be out-of-school to dig the rest, so they can have some of the fun.

This week many of the first grapes are sweet!

It will probably be another 2 weeks before we start to pick them so more are ready, but we are all getting excited.

Mom also started ordering installments of the canning foods.

Only a few boxes of peaches, pears, and tomatoes this week so we can pace ourselves!

While we are talking grapes - back early in August we had to prune many of the vines back to keep the cranberries from being overrun... and we attempted to create new vines.

Some of them took! We had alot of success after potting them by keeping them in the bucket with at least 1/2 inch of water at the base - these new starts have vigorous roots already.



What is really interesting is that these vines, clipped from the base growth, first put our new baby grapes before putting out new leaves - just like the new growth on the existing vines.

I expect these vines will be much more robust and productive than the vine starts we created from "end-clippings".