Back in late January, I planted potatoes across the front of our yard. We had recently built the terraced garden beds and filled them with dirt (clay lumps) and stable sweepings. Potatoes are a great way to break up lumpy dirt, rot down manures, and generally improve the soil.
Last Friday, Megan and I dug up the potato plants. Although the plants had died back, I would have liked to have left them a bit longer for the tubers to mature. Unfortunately we’d had a fair bit of rain during the week, and I didn’t want to risk them rotting in the ground.
So, up they came.
All up I think we got about 10-15 kg. Not a huge amount, but not bad. As I’d hoped, the garden bed was nicely broken down and had lots of really fat worms through it. We’re planning to put asparagus in that bed next.
I laid them out on some hessian and cardboard in a dark, airy, dry place in the garage so they could dry out before storing them. Once they were dry, I sorted all the small ones for eating this week, and then put all the bigger ones away in a box.
Potatoes are best stored in layers in a cardboard box, not touching each other, with hessian or newspaper in between each layer. They need to stay dry and cool, out of the light. It’s not so important for this small amount, where we’ll probably eat them all in less than a month, but for larger quantities proper storage is essential.
They taste awesome!
Planting spuds in January; we would not be able to do that in Brissy. Too much rain during Jan & Feb (and also March/April as it would be).
The potatoes I planted in March have started to flower already. So maybe another couple of months and I will have the first row ready for digging.
@Jason: We seem to be able to get away with doing a lot of things out of season down here. I bet you put in a lot of spuds with all your space!
I’m here from Problogger Day 23. What a cool, helpful site. I love this premise and hope to do just that when I have a plce of my own. (Maybe this Fall II’ll have some lawn instead of cement patio space.) BTW I put you on my Google reader so I can keep on learning and being inspired.
@Susan: Thanks! There’s so much you can do, no matter where you live. Don’t get hung up on the scale, just start something (anything!) and build from there. How are you finding the Problogger 31DBBB series? Is it helping your blog?
@Chrissy: Yep, they’re delicious. I never would have guessed there’d be a difference between store-bought potatoes and home-grown ones. Tomatoes, yes. But potatoes? I was surprised how much better they were!
Hi Darren
Great stuff! Thanks for the info too and I bet they taste absolutely awesome!
Cheers
Chrissy
WoW, it sounds awesome to me, Darren. What are you going to do with the potatoes? I can’t even wait to see your next post about how you’re dealing with those freshly harvested potatoes…
@Wilson: We’ve just put them in the box for storage, and will use them for normal meals. All the small ones will be boiled whole like new potatoes over the next couple of weeks, and then we’ll move onto the larger ones. They’re great baked – we’ve got some butternut pumpkins and beetroots nearly ready for picking, so I think some nice roast dinners could be in store as we head into winter. Mmmm. 🙂
We planted asparagus in the bed our spuds were in too – they are doing very nicely (if I can keep the chooks off them). We’re still eating our way through the harvest and they taste so good – it’s like eating a potato for the first time. I would have thought we’d have got more on each plant and next year I’m going to dig them deeper in soil and leave them longer so they’ll get bigger. We recently dug up a few that we’d missed and they were a bumper size but starting to go green (the chooks found them for us).
@Jacqui: I dug some more manure into that bed last weekend, and found a few more smallish potatoes that I’d missed. They were green too, so I just chucked them in the compost. The soil is really nice, so hopefully it’ll be just right for asparagus when spring comes. I’m not sure how I’m going to be able to resist picking any spears for the first two years, though! 🙂