Sunday
Linda
Yesterday was a scorcher, and hard rains with thunderstorms were expected for today, so Sonny and I thought we better get our onions and potatoes harvested while the sun was shining. The tops of the potato plants were beginning to turn brown and the onion tops were already dry and laying on the ground. Those are sure signs that they were ready to be dug.
Basket of Red Potatoes
We got up early yesterday morning before the weather turned into a pressure cooker and grabbed up the spade fork and a bushel basket. The ground was still a little moist. It was easy for Sonny to use the spade fork to push up the potatoes while I pulled the plants out of the ground. We were excited to see a bunch of dirt covered tubers hanging from the bottom of the each plant. For weeks we have wondered what we would find, whether they would be a good crop or rotten or blighted. Since this is our first garden here and we didn’t have time last fall to plow and fertilize and we weren’t sure how things would grow. We harvested a little less than a half a bushel of red potatoes in various sizes. Some had to be thrown away because of bad spots, some were perfect and others had a few bad spots but will be usable. Not bad for our first year.
The yellow onions were easy to pull out of the ground. They were fairly small in size and probably came to approximately three pounds. We spread them out on an old window screen and placed them in the sun to dry for about a day. Then we will hang them to cure. They will get the dry papery skin that you see on the onions you buy at the store. We also pulled up the rest of the green cabbage. We were not impressed with the cabbage. It was ok but had a few too many worm holes. It is still edible, but I don’t know if I will grow any next year. We did a few more chores around the farm then got ourselves cleaned up and went to town to do some shopping and see a movie where we could hide in air conditioning until the slightly cooler air of evening.
Off-Grid in West Virginia 
Now I wish we would had planted a couple more rows of potatoes. This year was our first real effort at a garden so we are still learning.
I like red potatoes. They are looking good. I think you have to have lady bugs for the lettace, to eat the bugs. unless you use a bunch of posin, then you would ended up with the posin. Kinda of like in the 60’s when we were kids…we used OFF spray to keep the bugs off and put in on like a shower. Hey we didn’t know DDT was bad. Maybe that has what been wrong with me all these years!