Reheading cabbage and short season sweet potato update

It's that time of year where I spend all my time gardening, and less time looking up gardening questions unless, of course, there is some problem...


So far, so good.


We have pests: cabbage moth, cucumber beetle, colarado potato beeltle (which only seems to be interested in my physalias - the primary reason I grow the invasive darlings). We have see-saw weather, but so far my veggie crises are minimal.



Re-heading cabbage



Same savoy as in the above link.


Can you see them? Darling little heads growing at the leaf axils as promised! They should make nice tender additions to a soup, a stirfry, my sandwich...

Sweet Potato Mulch

Short season sweeet potatoes starting to vine.


I keep hearing about how these things live by the same 'take-over-the-world-or-at-least-the-garden' moto as pumpkins so I am glad to see they are starting to live up to the promise.



Tender Fruit



Long, oriental type eggplant.


Thanks to clear plastic mulch, this is the first year that I have had such an impressive crop of sweet peppers and eggplants. Okay, perhaps I should be more clear. I have grown eggplants for three years in a row. The previous two years I have gotten less than 4 egg-fruits. Really, I hesitate to call them eggplant fruit at all as they were pathetic examples. I do not blaim the plants themselves but their growing conditions.



Mini-bells, italian frying and some other kind of pepper. They got knocked over as seedlings. It'll be a nearly blind taste test.

Thanks to Ken Allan's amazing book on growing short season sweet potatoes in the north called Sweet Potatoes in the Home Garden, I now have a new way to 'extend my climate zone.' Plastic mulch increases soil temperature which many plants, such as the aforementioned, appreciate.


Ken, you are one of my gardening idols.