Moxie Gardener has gone under the shovel. We’ll be pruning, deadheading and adding new specimens to make it easier for you to navigate the garden. Meanwhile, stop by often to see what’s new.

Fingerling potatoes--a rare find at the farmer's market.

Fingerling potatoes are smaller than regular potatoes and are shaped like fat fingers.  But they pack a whole bunch of flavor into those chubby “fingers.”  Available in purple and red, but most often yellow—like Yukon Gold potatoes—fingerling potatoes have a buttery flavor and waxy texture that make them perfect for salads and hot dishes.

Members of the Solanaceae family, fingerling potatoes’ Latin name is Solanum tuberosum.  They are native to the Andes Mountains in Peru, as are the more familiar, regular sized potatoes.

Fingerling potatoes are grown just like regular potatoes with an exception.  Don’t try to harvest them for “new potatoes,” in mid-summer—they won’t be large enough.  Wait the full 90 to 120 days potatoes take to mature, or until the vines start to die down in early fall, then harvest as full-sized (for them), mature potatoes.

Cut pieces of “seed potatoes” for fingerlings smaller than you would for regular potatoes.  Cut into pieces weighing approximately one ounce and that contain at least two “eyes.”  A pound of fingerling seed pieces will produce about 20 pounds of fingerling potatoes.  That’s more than twice the yield of regular potatoes.

Plant pieces of “seed potatoes” 4 to 6 inches deep and 18 inches apart in rows 36 inches apart.  Fingerling potatoes need loose, deep, sandy soil that has been improved with additions of compost, organic matter, and/or manure.

About 3 to 4 weeks after the sprouts emerge, hill up the soil, leaving only the top third of the sprout above the soil line.  Hill up again two to three weeks later, and keep repeating until flowers appear.  At that time, mulch soil with 4 to 6 inches of straw or other organic mulch.

Provide consistent moisture; even a brief dry period will produce smaller, misshapen tubers.  To control disease and fungus, water potatoes with a soaker hose rather than a sprinkler or other overhead method.

Fingerling potatoes are just as easy to grow as regular potatoes and they taste better and produce more.  Considering their premium prices at the supermarket and farmer’s market, they’re well worth growing in the home garden.

Dill seeds ripening

If I had the room and authority in the yard (I’m a renter) I would make an entire garden just for growing seeds.  The whole business of seed saving is fascinating to me.

It all started with dill.  The seed heads can be majestic, the umbels radiating like mini umbrellas without the fabric.  When I was a new gardener these were the first seeds I noticed.  The following spring when at least a dozen dill plants came up where the lone dill plant had grown the year before, something clicked in my brain.  I realized I could grow “free seeds.”

In the flower category it was calendulas.  They popped up all over my gardens for several years after planting gift-with-purchase seeds.  Eventually I gathered some to save and planted them on purpose.  They are quite prolific seed makers.

Cosmos seeds ready to harvest

Another flower that hooked me on seed saving was Bright Lights Cosmos.  I gathered seeds from a stranger’s yard in a mini flower bed growing next to a public sidewalk.  I filed them away for about four years until I got around to planting them.  When I finally did, only five plants came up.  From these five I gathered seeds and replanted the following year.  Germination skyrocketed, thanks to the freshness of the seeds, and the full spectrum of the mix grew—yellow, orange, red-orange and red.

We had a very dry spring and summer, with precipitation about three inches below average.  Consequently most of the radishes never developed.  I left several in the ground to go to seed.  They’ve produced seed quite well and I’m looking forward to a bumper crop next spring.

Several varieties of lettuce also sent up seed stalks which are now in the process of growing seeds.  Hopefully there’ll be enough frost-free weather before winter sets in for the seeds to form and mature.

Arugula in flower with seed pods in foreground

I purposely left an arugula plant to go to seed.  Wow!  The plant rivals my tarragon in size and spread.  Seed pods have already formed and again, I hope the weather cooperates this fall long enough for seeds to mature.

Savings seeds is satisfying as well as economical.  There’s something about eating vegetables from seeds I originally purchased years ago that is uber satisfying.  If you buy non-hybrid seeds and practice saving them, there’s no need to purchase new ones every year.  With the money I save I take the opportunity to try new varieties.  After all, variety is the spice of life.

Keep tomatoes fresh longer--right on the counter!

Have you heard of Green Bags?  They’re green plastic bags that help keep your produce from going bad for two to three times longer than using normal storage methods.

If you have a garden you need these green bags, especially at this time of year.

I first purchased my green bags two years ago from Home Shopping Network.  They’re one of the best investments I’ve ever made.   You can reuse them up to ten times.  Just rinse them out and air dry.

I’ve kept citrus—lemons, limes and oranges—for over a month.  Lettuce and cucumbers stay crisp and fresh for a week or two.  Almost everything stays fresher in green bags.

When frost threatened in late October last fall, I picked all of the peppers in my garden and placed them in green bags.  I stored the bags in a closet in an unheated hallway.  I was still using the peppers a month later.  They even ripened to yellow, orange and red in the bags and remained crisp until nearly Thanksgiving.  Pepperoncini peppers in green bags kept fresh in the crisper drawer in the refrigerator until December.

Home Shopping Network has several collections of green bags and the best bargain.  If you’d like to purchase a smaller quantity to try out, visit www.greenbags.com and the inventor, Debbie Meyer, will explain the concept to you personally.

Every gardener needs green bags, especially in late summer when the garden is producing everything in large quantities.  Maybe this year you won’t have to annomyously leave zucchini on your neighbor’s doorstep.

Pot Maker

Last spring I purchased a Pot Maker from www.lehmans.com, the website of an Ohio hardware store that specializes in selling historical tools and implements that are no longer manufactured anywhere else, although they offer products more widely available as well.  Lehman’s started in 1955 as a resource for the Amish community and have grown to be known all over the world.  I urge anyone interested in self-sufficiency and natural living to check them out.

The Pot Maker uses strips of newspaper to fabricate pots for starting seeds and growing on small seedlings for the garden.  The mechanism consists of a turned wood “peg” with a concave circle carved out of the underside and matching wood base with a convex circle that matches the peg. 

Peg bottom and base

Newspaper is rolled around the peg, the bottom folded under and the peg inserted into the base to “set” the shape of the pot.  Once I fine-tuned the size of the newspaper strips, I found it easy to use and the pots quite adequate for starting seeds.  My how-to follows.

1. Cut strips of newspaper 14 1/2″ X 7″ and fold in half lengthwise.
2. Place the pot maker peg on top of the paper, with the fold lined up with the top of the “pot” part of the peg piece.
3. Roll the newspaper around the peg.  The dimensions given make a pot where the newspaper is rolled around the peg twice.  Since the strip of newspaper is doubled to begin with, you end up with a four layer paper pot.  I found this to make a sturdier pot that does not fall apart if you pick it up or move it, especially when filled with wet soil.
4. Still holding the newspaper tight around the peg, fold the paper overhanging the bottom of the pot in four stages at 12, 6, 9, and 3 o’clock, much like you do when gift wrapping.
5. Insert the peg into the base and press down firmly and twist both directions a little.
6. Still holding the peg in the base, wrap your hand around the paper pot and carefully remove the peg.  You’ll need to shimmy it a little to get it out.

The first pot I made wasn’t pretty.  It took a couple tries to get it right.

Because newspaper absorbs water, your pots will be damp to the touch when the soil inside is damp.  I found this a convenient indicator of the need to water.  However, make sure the pots don’t touch each other; good air circulation will discourage mold.  Some of my pots that were placed too close together began to grow mold, but the simple act of placing them far enough away for air to circulate around them killed the mold.

Write the name and variety right on the pot with water-proof marker before you water thoroughly.  No need for pot markers that can lead to mislabeled plants.

When I planted my spring-started plants this year I ripped the newspaper pots off the plants before I set them in the ground.  I suppose you could set the pots right in the ground instead, but I like to introduce the plant’s roots to the surrounding garden soil as soon as possble without making them work for it.  Newspaper will deteriorate, but not soon enough for the plants, in my opinion.

I recommend the Pot Maker to anyone interested in starting seeds for planting out spring or fall.  You’ll save money by not purchasing peat pots and save the environment by not purchasing plastic pots and also by recycling newspaper into quite adequate seed starting pots.

I am starting this blog to share my enthusiasm for gardening and to learn from my visitors.

Why “moxie?”  Webster’s Dictionary defines moxie as “energy, pep, knowledge, enthusiasm, courage, and determination.”  These six words encompass my gardening philosophy.

I’ll get back to energy and pep in a moment.

Knowledge refers to the ability to understand your plant’s needs.  Meeting those needs gives you a return on your investment a thousandfold, be it in bloom or in produce.

Enthusiasm is what we all have for gardening or we wouldn’t be here on this blog.

Courage means we aren’t afraid to take a risk.  We’ll plant that untried specimen, try out that just-discovered pest deterrent, or eat that unfamiliar vegetable we grew because we couldn’t resist planting it.

Determination is what makes us, for example, cover up the pole beans with buckets every night and uncover them every morning for a month until they grew enough to climb the poles, out of reach of the rabbit that insisted on eating them.  Sure, I could have put up a fence or covered them with fancy row covers, but that just wasn’t in the budget this year.  My beans will come later than usual, but my determination rescued them from not bearing at all.

Energy and pep are part of the dictionary’s definition of moxie and truly belong in my philosophy of gardening.  If we are to succeed in bringing forth a crop we must expend energy to achieve that.  However, my energy is expended primarily in spring preparing and improving the soil and applying an effective mulch.  This gives the plants a rich fertile soil in which to grow, retains moisture and checks the growth of weeds.  Expend energy in spring and indulge in laziness all summer!

As for pep, it is defined, among other things, as initiative.  What gardener lacks that?