Garlic! Potatoes! Etc.!

The garlic and potatoes, both in the same bed, have been looking pretty miserable for a while now, so I finally dug them all up. The harvest was a big (emphasis on Big!) surprise. The Rabun County garlic is the pile of big bulbs on the left in the picture:

It’s a little hard to tell from the very busy photo, but a couple of those Rabun County bulbs are almost four inches in diameter. Needless to say, I’m “pleased as Punch.” Most of the rest of the harvest turned out well, too, although the Elephant garlic was disappointingly average.  I haven’t weighed the bulbs yet. I’m going to leave them out on the shady front porch for a couple of days to dry out a little, then finish trimming the bulbs (I already trimmed off the rootlets).

I had been thinking that the potato harvest would be pathetic, considering the weather this spring, but it wasn’t. I ended up with a little more than eighteen pounds of spuds from my two five-foot rows. The two rows were crammed into a space that is only about two feet wide, and I had thought, at planting time, that maybe I should just be planting one row in that narrow space, but there I was with extra seed potatoes and only a little space.

The White Cobbler was a lot more productive than the Red Pontiac, but that may be a result of the warm spring. I think White Cobbler tolerates the heat a little better.

The basket to the right in the picture above contains the tiny harvest from the multiplier onions. I plant these every year, in spite of the lack of robust productivity, on the chance that, one of these years, I will figure out exactly the right combination of everything to make these work for me. It is possible that our winters are just too warm for them, but the notion of being able to replant onions each year without actually having to buy sets or starts of any kind is appealing enough that I am not giving up yet.

In other news, this is yesterday’s harvest from the garden:

It still seems insanely early to be bringing in zucchini, but here they are!

And in yet other news, a couple of the baby bunnies will be heading off to new homes this week. Einstein (black with a white head) will be going home tomorrow afternoon, and Louie (the brown-with-silvering baby, soon to be called Darwin), will be heading toward his new home on Wednesday.

Since they are only about nine weeks old, this all feels like progress!

We plan to keep a white bunny (Burrito), as a companion for Mama Moonpie, but the other white (Tiny) and the black and white one (Holstein) that is almost like a Dutch breed bunny still need a home.

To get them all together for a group photo, I dropped a handful of alfalfa hay into the middle of their Timothy hay. They love alfalfa hay!

When the crowd has thinned out some, it will probably seem strange to be able to sweep the bunny enclosure without having two or more babies hopping into the dust pan, another one chasing the broom, and one or two others trying to sit on my feet, but I am sure I will get used to it.

Home gardening can provide a lot of good food for families and communities. It’s also some work, but I love it. This blog is about the garden and yard where I “grow my own,” NW of Atlanta, Georgia.

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