4 minute read
Garden Chat
from Mankato Magazine
By Jean Lundquist
Those pesky raccoons
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Plus, tales of onions and potatoes
All summer long, a very adroit raccoon, or maybe two or three, made me very glad I didn’t grow sweet corn this summer.
He, she, or they have visited every single solitary day to come up onto the step by the side door and eat cat food, then retire to under the bird feeders where wayward sunflower seeds, discarded by mostly blue jays for unknown reasons, have been scattered.
I suppose in a large field, feeding raccoons a few dozen, or even a few hundred ears of corn is not a big deal. But half a dozen short rows of corn in my garden were always stripped of ears while I got little chance to enjoy them myself.
This year, I had a fleeting thought that, because I have a fence around my little plot, it might be fun to plant the whole thing in sweet corn. But when I saw that rotten raccoon scaling the pole to help itself to my oriole feeders, I knew that fence would have done nothing but make them laugh.
Nothing growing inside my 4-foot-high chain-link fence has appealed to them, apparently. And the fence has done a good job of keeping out bunnies and deer, so all is well in the garden this year.
It truly amazes me how much better plants do growing in the ground than growing in a grow bag. Watering the bags twice a day in the August heat became quite the chore. I had to use well water rather than rainwater, and that also makes a remarkable difference. Plants seem to prefer rainwater for both foliage growth and fruit setting.
I admit I ran out of room in the garden and resorted to using a few grow bags for the leftovers that I didn’t give away. It’s been an eye-opener for me to watch the progress of the long red cayenne pepper in the bag compared to all the peppers growing in the garden. The cayenne pepper is so stunted by comparison.
I do like my grow bags for growing potatoes, though. It is so much easier to harvest them when all that is needed is to tip the bag and reach in.
No more slicing through potatoes with a shovel. No
more wondering how far out and how deep to dig.
Always on the prowl for something new to try in the garden, I did make a change with my potatoes this year. I happened across a YouTube video online of a gardener advocating not cutting potatoes apart to separate the eyes, but just planting them whole.
I wish I had counted the eyes in each potato and had kept a record of them. I’d then know how many pieces of cut potato I would have had, and how many potatoes I would have expected, compared to how many I will now end up with.
From the looks of the foliage, I assume none of the potatoes rotted, which is always a concern with cut potatoes. I’ll let you know how they turn out.
I also have an onion story. Last year, I planted copra onions, plus a few red onions called “blush.” The people I bought them from gave me the blush just to try a few.
None of the onions grew very big, as they were in bags, but they were reasonably sized. I brushed them all off, put them in a paper bag and saved them in our mudroom. I don’t know why I didn’t take them down to the root cellar. I just didn’t. They were so handy, being just in the next room, I guess.
I pulled out all the blush onions to use first, as we all know red onions aren’t good keeping onions. Then I moved onto the yellow onions, my copras.
By early May, some of the onions had started to sprout, but that’s not unusual, and I just used them first. The last onion I pulled out of the paper bag in early June had not sprouted. When I cut into it, it was red!
I was astonished. The center was green, and it likely was just days away from sprouting, but it lasted all winter and spring long in lessthan-ideal storage conditions.
At that point it was too late to get and plant blush onions. For one thing, my garden was full.
But next year, I’ll be planting blush onions, and I may even take them to the root cellar for storage.
Jean Lundquist is a Master Gardener who lives near Good Thunder. gardenchatkato@gmail.com
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