Dry and bagged = 1/2 of today's harvest.

Love it. I pulled and trimmed onions today. It felt good to work in the garden a little bit.

WOW what a great haul!! Some folks will be very happy!!!

sorie6,

That was day one. Today (day two) we did even better. Two day total is more than 5,000 pounds. We still have five rows to do tomorrow. I'm guessing more than 6,000 pounds from 1.5acres. It would have been better but we are fighting very bad Field Bind Weed.

Interesting observation, some of the potato plants that were stunted and almost killed by the bind weed still produced a few medium potatoes.

We had about 75 people there at one time today. A LOT of folks went home with A LOT of potatoes. However, we still delivered about 1,500 pounds to the cold storage walk in at our food bank.

The deal was that you take home 1/3 of what you pick up.

Johnny

Holy Moly! That is awesome!

Johnny, Congratulations on the great harvest and I just love that you had so many people show up today.

We have had a great potato harvest also, and I'm thinking of commandeering the extra fridge out in the garage so I can do cold-storage of some of our crop out there. In the summertime it mostly just has cold drinks in it, and sometimes some freshly-harvested produce waiting to be processd, but I could move all that to the big fridge indoors and use the garage fridge for taters. I do hate to break that news to the guys though. Imagine if I did it while they both were at work one day and didn't tell them, and then they opened the garage fridge to get a cold drink, and found it filled up with potatoes instead!

Dawn

Dawn,

If they had creamed potato wedges for supper the previous night, they wouldn't say a thing.

Kinda strange, many (most) of our Red Pontiac are the size of small melons.

Johnny

All,

Three day total for 1 1/2 acres = just short of 7,000 pounds. We had another great group of volunteers today. I'll be blanching and freezing for the next few days. I saved 80 pounds just for me.

Worked out to about 5.41 / 1

Johnny

That's terrific. My Red Pontiacs were big too. I think they just really liked the weather this year since there wasn't much cold after they were planted.

Dawn,

It took all four varieties we planted about 4 or 5 weeks to peak out of the dirt. They were only covered with about 4 inches of dirt. We planted them shallow (2") with our planter, our planter covered the seed pieces with two inches of soft dirt for a total of four inches. We were trying to make it easier to harvest them with our circa 1930 John Deere Hoover potato digger. Our plan worked very well. We got tired and a little sloppy. We sliced about 10 potatoes in half during the entire three days.

Johnny

PS - We probably would have harvested close to 9,000 but the field bind weed smothered some of our potato plants. We are fairly happy with a little less than 7,000 pounds though.

Johnny, that is a wonderful harvest. I only plant a few potatoes, 4 rows probably 16 feet long and we have dug the 2 rows of Yukon Gold. I just ate the first one tonight and it was delicious. We drove home from Searcy AR today after attending my husband's high school reunion last night. He drove the 300 miles home and about 100 miles of it through heavy rain, and when we got about 50 miles from home, the road was closed and we had to take a long detour. So we were happy to be home and all I wanted to eat was a baked potato for dinner.

We saw 3 accidents, and one of them was horrible. We didn't see it happen, but we got there just seconds after it happened. That one happened before we hit the rain, and the other two were just one car accidents that looked like they had hydo-planed. Of course, when you are in the mountains even that is serious and one ended up in the trees, and the other hit a rock ledge. At least they walked away from those two.

I did a walk-thru of my garden when I got home and noted that it really needs my attention this week.

soonergrandmom,

I'm glad you made it home safe. It has been a very interesting potato crop. I'm a little smarter now. We had a little problem with wire worms. It was confined to one small patch of that 1 1/2 acre field. Maybe we'll turn some chickens loose in there.

Johnny

Johnny, I'm glad your plan worked out so well, and y'all hardly sliced any at all. Just think about how many meals people will get out of that 7,000 lbs. I found a small number of wire worms in my potato beds as I dug, but not enough of them to have really done any damage to the crop.

Your comment about field bindweed hit home with me. Yesterday I was planting a succession crop in a potato bed that I had finished harvesting last week. I had dug and dug and dug until I thought I had found all the potatoes in it. So, of course, the first thing I did was dig up two blue potatoes I had missed. They blend in pretty well with the soil, but still....after digging that bed twice, I cannot believe there still were two potatoes left in it.

Then, as I started transplanting pepper plants into that bed, I kept having to pull up little field bindweed sprouts. Dozens and dozens and dozens. Sometimes they weren't even above ground yet, but when I dug a hole for a pepper plant, I'd find a 1, 2 or 3" long sprout underneath the soil surface, growing and headed for the sunlight. That bindweed was here the first year we broke the ground and rototilled it and began our attempt to turn part of a cow pasture into a garden. Some of those seeds sprout every year. They'll probably sprout every year for the next 50 years. I bet if I went away for two weeks of vacation, I'd come home to bindweed everywhere, burying everything beneath it under its rapid onslaught of growth. It is such a pernicious weed and the seeds from years ago continue to pop up every year, even in no-till beds where I try my best not to disturb the soil too much. Bindweed will outlive and outlast all of us here on this earth.

Carol, That must have been a long drive home in all that rain. I'm glad that y'all made it home safely and that you got to eat a delicious home-grown baked potato for dinner too. Just thinking about that now is making me hungry. Maybe I'll eat one for breakfast.

I took advantage of the rain-cooled air (we didn't get the rain, unless you count the 0.01" in our rain gauge as rain, but we had clouds and lovely rain-cooled air from the storms north of us that caused a wide swath of flooding across the state) yesterday to do quite a bit of work in the garden, and it needed the attention, but there's still a lot more work to do. I'm going out at daybreak this morning so I can work as long as possible before the heat drives me indoors. I wonder if I'll even last out there until noon? We've been having about 1 encounter per day with copperheads, so I've backed off on the weeding a bit because once there's copperheads in my garden, I'm really careful about where I put my hands. I am sure the weeds are rejoicing that no one is yanking them out of the ground lately.

We have high heat index numbers in the forecast for the rest of the week, so I guess I'll slide into the summertime routine of hitting the garden early in the morning and then spending the rest of the time indoors processing the harvest. I hate it when the heat sets in and makes it hard to stay outdoors as long as I'd like, but there's really no escaping the summer heat other than being indoors.

Dawn

Dawn, we didn't get much of the rain at our house, but enough to make the ground wet. I pulled a few weeds and they came out easily. My onions are about ready to pull, so I am hoping those raised beds dry out today. We still have a chance of thunderstorms today, but the 'possibility number' keeps dropping, so maybe it will miss us. I am tired from the trip so I doubt I will get much done today....but there is always tomorrow. My garden kind of looks like a wasteland. Everything that should be growing, is growing, but with all of these small showers everything else is growing also. I left some broccoli in the ground and have been harvesting some side shoots, but I will do the last of that today and start yanking those out. I need to do a general cleanup because the many tomato plants need the room. LOL My comfrey plant is huge and needs to be cut back and used to mulch the fruit trees.

I made a small bed for carrots this year and the tops were so large they were falling over, so I have been pulling them. The carrots didn't get very big but part of that is due to not thinning them and that I didn't plant a large one to start with. I usually have a lot of trouble with carrots, but I think I have now learned the method that works here, so maybe I will plant a longer type next year. I mixed play sand and compost into a small raised bed and that seemed to do the trick. I planted a few in the ground as a comparison and they didn't do nearly as well.

I left this message unfinished and went out to do a little gardening. The poultry will have a feast today with everything that is coming out of the garden. It is 79 and overcast, so not too bad for working outdoors, just muggy. I still don't have any ripe slicers, but have had a few cherries from Tumbling Tom and I saw the first ripe Sungold out there today.

I pulled one tomato plant that looked wilted about 3/4ths of the time, I just got tired of it's pitiful look. I have a little yellowing on some bottom leaves of a few, but overall they look good. They will look better when I am seeing some red, pink, yellow, and black showing up, because I am ready for a BLT.

I have a big hollow tree stump that I have been planting in for a few years and I normally plant a couple of upright flowers in it, plus an ornamental sweet potato vine in the front to hang down over the tree. I did put the SP vine in it again but it isn't very big yet. I was finished with the tomato planting and was just sticking in a few Tumbling Tom plants here and there to get rid of them. I put one in that stump and I have never seen one small plant with so many tomatoes on it. It is amazing. I think it has stayed damp for two months in that stump, and the stump is covered with mushrooms. LOL This may be the last year for my "stump garden", as I am sure there is some heavy rotting happening.

A little shower rolled through and dropped very little rain, but our air temperature and heat index fell a lot, for which I'm grateful. It seemed like we weren't going to get much rain but then another wave came through and it is dropping light to moderate rain, so I think we'll get enough to make the plants happy, and to keep me from having to water containers today.

I was able to work outside for as long as I needed to in order to harvest a ton of tomatoes, the first pole beans (Aunt Bea's), too many cucumbers, the first peaches of the year, the first ears from the Texas Honey June sweet corn, some more plums, and I even ran a digging fork through the potato beds and found a few I had missed. I weeded a little here and there and pulled a few diseased leaves off my Brandywine tomato plants, which produced their first ripe Brandywine today. Well, almost ripe. It will be perfect in 2 or 3 days. I even let the chickens and turkeys into the garden to roam around, as I have for the last few days, and now I'm seeing very few grasshoppers, though it is hard to know if the chickens are responsible for that, or if the grasshoppers went back into hiding when it rained like crazy a few days back.

The rest of my day clearly will involve making pickles, and possibly the first batch of salsa. I might postpone the first batch of salsa until tomorrow just because I feel like by the time I finish 2 or 3 batchs of pickles, I might be tired. I started pretty early this morning and am running out of steam now.

I bet your stump does have major decay going on with all those mushrooms growing on it. It will be too bad if this is the last year you can use it as a planter because it sure has come in handy for that purpose....and it will give you some great decomposed wood compost.

Our chickens have been feasting a lot lately too, especially because I've been yanking out bolted lettuce daily to feed them. They also have figured out it is canning season, so they follow me to the compost pile every time I walk out the door headed in that direction. I don't know how we get any compost, because the chickens devour anything worth eating, from their point of view, that I toss on the compost pile.

I'm glad I was able to get all the harvesting done, but wish I had weeded more before the rain got here. I really thought the rain would slide by and miss us like it did yesterday, but it found us today. We needed it. I already had put some succession crops in the potato beds, so they are getting watered in well now.

We had a lot of help harvesting our potatoes this year. Now, I'm wondering if we should expand next year.

Should the caption read "Plant them and they will come."? Gives a WHOLE new meaning to "Field of Dreams"!!!!!

Job well done, Johnny!!!!

p_mac,

Channel 25 in OKC was instrumental in directing volunteers to us at St. Francis of the Woods. SUCH A BLESSING!

Johnny, Do you have room to expand? If you have the room to plant more potatoes, and if you believe you'll have enough volunteers to help harvest, then why not grow more? Potatoes provide a lot of nutritional bang for the buck, are very filling and can be held in storage for quite a while, so they seem ideal for your program. And, honestly, have you ever seen me encourage anybody to plant less of something?

Paula, I agree with you. I think now that the word is out about Vision Farms, all Johnny and his group has to do is just get the planting done and then the volunteers will show up to help with the harvest. It is pretty amazing.

Dawn

Ha! I didn't know you got a picture - there I am in my potato-picking glory....it was hot, but it was fun and I was glad to help!

Sharon

Dawn,

Yes, we have been offered 10 acres just one mile north of that field. AND, we have been offered the use of a cabin for one employee to live in, bills paid. However, try as I might, I can't find anyone interested in learning to grow.

Please spread the word about this opportunity. The offer may be withdrawn if we can't find someone who wants the country life.

Sharon,

Thank you for helping. We (all of us) harvested and donated 7,000 pounds of potatoes! YES!

Johnny, I hope you can find that one employee to live, bills paid, in the cabin. Have you tried checking with OSU or some other college in your region (preferably one with some ag or horticulture classes) to see if y'all could offer it to their ag students as a student internship kind of thing? Or, maybe you could spread the word via the Oklahoma Gardening Network and Oklahoma Frugal Gardening Facebook pages? Both have lots of members with an interest in gardening, and there might be someone on there who knows someone who'd be perfect for your project.

Dawn

Dawn,

Are you on the other forums that you mentioned? If so, would you spread the message?

Johnny

405-531-1229

Johnny8@cox.net

I will post to Ok gardenng and OK wildcrafting, Johnny.

AmyinOwasso,

Thanks.

We have posted our intern position on the OSU hire board. Fingers crossed.

https://www.myinterfase.com/okstate/job.aspx

*Job ID:78500
*Job Title:Vegetable Grower
Employer Name :
Vision Farms
Work Schedule:DailyWage/Salary:$400 mo & housing*Job Description:Growing
food for sale and for our charity. You will need a good foundation in
agronomy and business. We will support you with equipment, seed, tools,
etc...


Your housing is only one mile from the ten acre plot you will be responsible for. We do not use pesticide or herbicide.


You will be responsible for market research, customer development,
crop planning, crop care, harvesting, record keeping and marketing. We
have another garden plot you can use to grow cash crops to supplement
your wages.*Application Instructions:Please call Jennifer Bozarth @ 405-570-2505 or Johnny Coleman @ 405-531-1229


OR


email Johnny8@cox.net

https://www.facebook.com/visionfarms

Dawn,

We were prepping to plant pumpkins last week. We had to move (haul away) about three or four thousand pounds of bindweed. WOW. I am so glad we had a tractor with a front loader.

Johnny

https://www.facebook.com/visionfarms

That's a crazy amount of bindweed. Are you going to compost it? Charlles Wilbur used compost made from kudzu to produce world record sized plants, so it seems to me that bindweed grows about as crazy-fast as kudzu and might help improve your soil. Of course, it would have to be a hot, hot, hot compost pile to kill any bindweed seeds that might have formed already.

Charles Wilbur's Plants

Dawn,

I doubt it. The folks that work on that farm will probably burn it.

If they aren't interested in composting it, I cannot say I blame them, especially if it has set seeds already. Let's hope that burning the plants doesn't make the seeds germinate, like it does with some forest trees.