Calendula is starting to bloom. One of the few flowers I grow. Of course only because it is medicinal.
Okra also has beuatiful flowers, almost hibiscus like. The plants are tall and this the winds we have had lately (60 knots yesterday) have beatn them up, but the tick along. Cool weather has slowed them but we still get a few here and there. i am just planting another bunch in between my squash ready for spring.
I put in my first foray into serious potato production yesterday - kennebecs and chieftains. This is my iteration on the manadala layout which I use almost exclusively cause it works so well. This is my attempt to convert it to something useful for potatoes. For thos who don't know, the mandala looks like a round keyhole from above. The path in the middle allows you to access the bed without walking on it, yet takes up on 4% of the 8 ft diameter circle. So I get 45 square feet of planting space on a 50 ft space. Using traditional rows I would likely only get 50% growing space - 45 out of 50 is 90%.
The unused spaces at the outer edges of the circle are places for trees. You can see a few banana there now. I am going to place some jackfruit, sugar apple and cherimoya there along with papaya. The bits of straw like stuff you see is leftover chia plants. Most of it is stuffed into the path right now and I'll distribute it as the potatoes grow. (I use a deeply sunken trench up to 18 inches, again my innovation for the mandala as a repository for compost and rain runoff - a heaven for worms).
I am considering interplanting the potato - 45 per circle - with some corn and beans. Only a few corn (say 12) and at least one bean per potato plant. (Anyone familar with land equivalent ratios?) I'll place them in the trench dug to hame the hills, leaving enough space between them to continue hilling up. The potato is some much higher in the trench, they shouldn't compete much. And the light shade the corn provides should boost potato yields.
The last picture shows the 4 circles I dug yesterday morning. At 5lbs of seed per bed, I expect at least 50lbs of potatoes per bed to harvest. And I still have 70lbs of seed to plant!
