A late potato harvest
A big surprise on Saturday: 2007’s efforts are still bearing fruit. Well, vegetables, to be more precise.
After some general tidying of the fruit border, and admitting defeat on all but one of the sunflower seeds we planted (we filled the gaps where the others should have popped up with immature tomato plants), we turned out one of the three remaining potato bags.
We were sure they’d been in there too long and that this was nothing more than a maintenance job. So we cut back the now quite wild foliage expecting that the leggy shoots would be growing from nothing more exciting (or edible) than rotting tubers. How wrong we were. On tipping out the rich compost in which we’d been growing them we found that a bumper crop of spuds had survived, and indeed flourished through the winter.
All but four were firm, and I suspect that the four rotters may have been the seed potatoes from which we started the crop anyway, leaving us 56 good, firm potatoes ready to store in the outhouse. Together they weighed a kilo and a half, pushing the total value of our potato crop from last year’s sowings to more than £15, and our total for the year as a whole well beyond our £200 target.
With another two bags to go could we have a further 100 potato waiting to be harvested just outside the kitchen door? And that’s before we get around to planting this year’s chitted seeds.
If you liked that post, then try these...
A hedgerow harvest on July 13th, 2008
Babies on June 11th, 2007
Beetroot and Broccoli on August 5th, 2007
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