To the Dump Finally

We took the peppers to the post office

I cut down a small elm tree growing where it should not be and loaded it on the trailer.  The chain was dull and would not cut.  Yesterday, a new chain was put on.  I was able to cut the tree down and cut it into pieces and load it on the trailer.

We took it to the dump.  A neighbor, Dee Frost, come in right behind us and helped unload it.  That sure saved some time.

After lunch I started to dig the sweet potatoes.  The one in the photo is a white potato on the west end of the raised bed.  I used a small garden trowel to remove the soil.  I thrust into the soil a safe distance from the sweet potato and cut into one of the potatoes.  I carefully removed the soil.  Sometimes with the trowel and other times with my hands.  I felt like I was in an archeological field uncovering rare artifacts.

I have removed more soil and some of the potatoes.  There was two nursery cans.  I put the soil in the cans.

The potatoes are on the grass and the nursery can full of soil is on the top left hand corner.

This is the center of the clump.  I haven't dug any on the back side.

The potatoes from the first plant are piled on the grass.  Quite a bunch.

Starting with the orange sweet potato.  Roots growing all over the place.

There were not many potatoes on this plant.  The light orange, yellow potato is the mother potato.  Early this spring I planted a potato where most of the starts were cut off.

The next plant produced whole bunch of potatoes.  The yellowish one on the bottom middle is the mother potato.  I dug around it and pulled out potato after potato.

I dug out a couple more white potatoes.  The white were much different from the orange.  The white ones had roots that went all over and on the end of them were small narrow potatoes.  I cleaned some in this egg bucket.  The mother potato is on top

  Below is the mother of one of the orange potatoes.

The cleaned white potatoes in a tote in the house.

The orange sweet potato is below.

At the end of the day I prepared the sweet potato bed for next year.  I am going to raise the height about four inches.  In the bed below most of the roots went into the hard clay.

The saffron plant is blooming.

 I harvested the red stigmas which is the spice.  There are three stigmas on each flower and one flower per plant.  They are about an inch long.  The photo is pretty fuzzy.

I cleaned Carols laundry hamper.  She hasn't used it for that purpose for many years.  We have stored the plastic grocery bags in it.

Worked on the raised bed in house two. It is made with 2x6 boards.  I put a brick under each corner.  I then laid bricks down the right side and forced them under the 2x6.  On the left side I put a 2x4 under the 2x6.  I have hauled in several wheel barrow loads of compost and put it on top of the recycled potting soil.  The don't show in the photo.

Comments and questions are welcome.