With potatoes, it seems like I'm progressing backwards. Two years ago - by fluke I got it nearly right. This year, I've reaped both my first earlies and 2nd earlies. Both have been fairly disappointing.
The 2nd's looked ready - the tops of the plants were starting to die back. Because of this and the recent blight watch alerts in my area (I wasn't exactly sure what to do other than panic about blight), I decided it was time for them to come out.
These were from one of my new raised beds. What I'd done, was to dig out the outline to the raised bed - digger deeper at the high side, so as to try to even out the slope in the ground (only partially successfully). The earth from that I'd just chucked in the middle. Then I'd filled the rest in with some lovely new top-soil.
Here's my crop:
A bucket and a tad is not much of a haul from 2sqm's of bed at all. It probably only just covers the cost of the seed potatoes. What was really clear though, was that where the seed potato had gone into a deep bit of the new top-soil, I'd got big potatoes. Where they'd gone in next to the old hard soil or where the soil wasn't very deep then there were either none or tiny weeny little potatoes.
So, in future:
1) Dig over the soil much more throughly
2) Only plant spuds in my deeper raised beds.
On the upside, I've still got more courgettes than I can eat. Keep smiling.
It's a hard one, but looks as though you might have dug them up a bit early?? Potatoes also like a nice rich soil - a good bit of manure or loads of compost should help. We did really badly this year as blight struck early. Did a fun taste test on the 6 varieties we grew though - over on CTs blog - http://radix4roots.blogspot.com/2010/08/potatoes-weve-ingested-infested.html - if you're interested.
ReplyDeleteit seems quite a few of my friends did badly with potatoes and some other stuff... I think the dry weather was to blame... although everyone I know has done amazingly with their courgettes... what that all about?
ReplyDeleteI tried to water the potatoes fairly often, I've been told too that you can over water them and send them mouldy.
ReplyDeleteChoc - how much longer should second 'earlies' be left, do you think? They'd been in for ages and were starting to look very much worse for wear.
I think I may stick to courgettes instead in futre. Much less frustrating.
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