I think our crawl space is too warm to over-winter potatoes for seeding.

Chris planted them anyway today. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens!

I used up the last of our red cabbage and onions the other week. We still have nearly an entire crisper drawer in the fridge full of carrots, which are surprisingly still crispy – and delicious! We have a grocery bag of them in the garage too – since they are frozen they aren’t good for eating raw, but they do work well in soups. We need to figure out a better storage method for carrots this year. We do have a second refrigerator in the garage, but I don’t know if we’ll have enough extra food to justify turning it on.

We still have quite a few potatoes, but even keeping them covered in the cool crawl space didn’t prevent them from sprouting. Chris is planning on planting them this year, so they won’t be wasted.

Now that it’s November, we’ve actually been gardening.

Actually, Chris dug up his potatoes the other week, and they are stored for the winter in our crawl space under the steps/pantry. There are two bread racks full – hopefully they will stay cool and dark enough to last through the winter.

He grew red, blue, and white varieties. The red don’t store as long, so we’re using them first.

Today we spent most of the day outside cleaning up the garden for the winter. I pulled a lot of onions and carrots out of the ground, and hope to have time over the next few days to post some more photos.

Since it was Sunday we tried to take it easy, but I planted some potatos in straw next to the garden. Nigel ate a few when I wasn’t looking, but there are still plenty.

We decided we’d plant all the potatos in straw on account of how clay-y the soil is. This is a picture from the other day so you can’t see all the old logs i put to mark the potato plot.

Apparently, what you do is just put more and more straw on top of the plant and the potatos keep making more tubers. This appeals to me as I read One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuokaa few months back and that guy uses straw for EVERYTHING.

My hope is to follow they way of natural farming and try to avoid doing stuff. Thats when you get into trouble. I also learned never to use bare hands handling really dry grass.

Here is a bed in the back I tilled under. I planted rye late last summer (or was it fall?), but it didn’t take too well. I think I should have watered. Over to the left is a bed of garlic which must’ve died with the weird weather we had. I stupidly forgot to put any straw on top. Oh well. I talked to Herman the allium man a few weeks ago and I plan to do a fair amount of garlic this fall. UPDATE: I saw what I can only imagine is two little garlic sprouts when I was out today.

Thats the compost. For those of you that aren’t all that acquainted with compost I can assure you it doesn’t smell. I mean it used to smell really bad, especially when I put a bunch of flour in there, but if you do it right it is an aeorobic process and not an anaerobic one (like remember in gym class how they said jogging is aerobic and lifting weights is like anaerobic? it has something to do with oxygen, I guess).

Speaking of oxygen, I am also going to use some of this stuff to make compost tea, which believe it or not entails me putting some compost in a cloth bag and putting that in a bucket filled with water. Then you run one of those oxygenator deals you see in a fish tank and some time passes and you sleep and eat and everything, maybe a couple times, and then you’ve brewed yorself some nutritious tea*.

I have been slowly learning the dos and don’ts of compost and I think we’ll truck this stuff out to the big garden to start a new compost pile. I need a good compost book. I am reading Sir Albert Howard’s book
An Agricultural Testament about the indore process and whatnot. Maybe that’ll help.

Update: we planted some blue potatos in the bed pictured above. We are going to plant all our potatos at home.

*The tea is for plants. I probably won’t drink any.