Harvesting punchkins och potatis!

For the past many weeks, I've told my wife it's time to harvest: "The pumpkins / potatoes are ready!" or "The frost is coming, we better do it soon...". But we managed to delay our mass-harvest until now, almost mid-May! If you consider that we planted in our dutch cream potatoes back on the 5th November 2011, and the pumpkins on 29th October 2011, the growing season has been quite extended this year. The potatoes and pumpkins have been in the soil for 186 and 192 days, respectively, when usually they get harvested much sooner, I think.

Potatoes can of course be kept in the soil for longer (some people have even told us to store them in the ground and just dig them out when we need, but that would risk rotting them if there is any heavy rain). Walthum butternut pumpkins, on the other hand, were supposed to have been ready by late March—I believe the seed packet said harvest in about 150 days. I'll have to check that another day.

our punchkins! you'll notice that we named them :)

I haven't weighed the harvest yet, but it took many many trips to bring all the pumpkins into the car, and then out the car into the backyard. I estimate we have about 30 pumpkins, each one weighing on average 2kg. That's around 60kg! Once I've weighed them all, I'll post the 'data' on the Butternut Pumpkins 2012 page. :)

Many other people at our community garden planted butternut pumpkins this year. However, everyone got very different results. The patch that me and my wife looked after probably had the greatest number of plants: 8 in total! This is why we had more than 30 pumpkins popping out: on average, around 4 pumpkins per plant. Some told us that they only got around two small pumpkins. Perhaps a corollary of this almost double the harvest is the extended planting season. Most other gardeners had harvested their pumpkins two or more weeks ago, including one guy (Keith) who planted in his pumpkins in around January. In summary: longer growing time = bigger pumpkins, generally speaking. (There are of course other factors too, as I talk about below.)

my DW holding up two long dutch cream potatoes

Before I planted my potatoes, I read on this website one family's experiences growing several different varieties of potatoes, and at different times of the year, in Tasmania. It made me realise that the variety and timing of planting out potatoes, as well as the weather conditions that year, all contribute to the harvest. Anyway, their preference in terms of output was Dutch Cream. For example, the author of that blog found that twenty tubers of Dutch Cream resulted in a 14.5 kg harvest when planted out in September, and 30kg (more than double) when planted out in October. We planted 13 seed potatoes (bought from Bunnings), so I guess I was expecting anywhere between 9.4 to 19.5 kg at the most. I estimate that todays' bag of potatoes weighed about 10–15 kg. Add the 12.8 kg that I have already taken out of the soil, and that is a massive 22–27 kg of potatoes that we got. We couldn't have asked for more, really!

me digging for potatoes

This means that there is probably more than enough potatoes to feed me, my wife, and my housemate, over the next 4 or 5 cold winter months. As a main source of carbohydrate, I prefer rice (jasmine, medium grain, or brown), but because we have so many potatoes, we'll probably have them quite regularly. However, potatoes have a higher GI-index, so it's still not ideal as our main source of carbohydrate.

Who should we give credit for our beautiful and plentiful harvest of pumpkins and potatoes this year? I give most credit to the gardener who managed our patch for the last 6 or so years: Tony. We never met him, but fellow gardeners have told me that he was very skilled. Our garden convenor advised me that the soil was very fertile. I was initially unconvinced because some patches appear to have a high clay composition, but the health and quantity of our produce gives credence to the claim.

soaked broad beans over a few nights
in a dilute Seasol® solution

I feel a bit bad that our pumpkins and potatoes have depleted much of the good nutrients that Tony put into the soil. That's what organic gardening is all about: feeding the soil. For the potato patch, I'm putting in two buckets of bokashi matter (a topic for a separate post!), while in the pumpkin patch we put in broad beans today (see photo). I hope it will fix some nitrogen before we put our solarium plants next season: tomatoes, potatoes, capsicums, eggplants, etc. We'll also do barley as a green manure crop later in winter, too, because some research (back in 1979) suggests that it's good for tomatoes (see this COGS webpage).

broad beans planted neatly in rows (40–50cm row space, 30cm plant space)

Tomorrow, it's back to the patch to pop in the bokashi matter and do a bit more weeding! Goodnight for now. (Oh my goodness, it's way past bedtime!)