2012 potato order

Wet. Trying to decide what to buy for this season. Have decided to use saved seed from Saxon and pink fir apple this year. Elmers currentlyy low on stock of most seed potatoes but expecting more in. I picked up a bag of desiree to be going with, will be buying rocket, another 2nd early and another maincrop as yet to be decided.

Digging 2012

Back again for a new year and a little more digging. Nice and easy compared to last years double dig!

Christmas harvest

On the menu for christmas will be roast potatoes,parsnips,beetroot,squash,pumpkin,carrot,cabbage,leeks,swede,kale,onions…. but no sprouts.

Went through all of the stored spuds, rubbing off sprouts and checking for bad ones – all were OK. Onions are also storing very well.

Monster Parsnips

December, and still mild, although there was a frost this morning. Started digging over the south end of the plot in readiness for next years spuds. Up came the last two kohl rabi (not sure they’ll be fir for consumption) and a few carrots which will hopefully keep til christmas.
The parsnips at home are poor this year, rather stunted. But the ones here are enormous! Difficult to dig up because they go so deep, this one was about 2 feet long. Dug another couple of leeks, but these are a rather dissapointing this year.

Mild November

So far, November has been pretty mild, and the remaining crops have continued growing. The leeks look to have mostly recovered from the earlier leek moth, and are doing fairly well. Nothing hugebut reasonable. Hopefully they will put on a little more weight if the mild weather continues. The swedes are very poor really, just a few reasonably sized swedes and lots of very small ones. Pigeons have been attacking any spring cabbages which weren’t covered by wire. Onions and potatoes are storing well, there a few carrots in a box of soil, and a few beetroot left in the ground. Parsnips are dying down, but no frost so haven’t dug any yet. Planted out 20 cloves of supermarket garlic today, first time I’ve planted in autumn.

First Frost

After a bit of a late summer, autumn is definately here, quite a sharp frost last night. The pumpkins (a dozen hooligan) and squashes (a few hybrid saved seed, only one or two true squash are ripening in the greenhouse. The last of the sweencorn (not great this year) is long gone, and the courgette plants are now on the heap along with the beans. The cucumbers have one small one left to go in the greenhouse, all in all excellent and the lesson learned was to stagger planting and plant outside, no need for the greenhouse really! The flyaway carrots are very good, decent sized roots with little damage, same can’t be said for the last nantes to be pulled!

Time to make sure the brassicas are fully protected before the pigeons start getting hungry

Final Spud Harvest

All potatoes are now lifted, dug up a further 25.8kg pink fir apple and 42.2kg Cara today. This brings the grand totals to:

First Earlies (Rocket and Accord) 65kg
Saxon 40kg
Desiree 53kg
Cara 49kg
Pink Fir Apple 53kg

TOTAL 260kg

Spud harvest continued

Rain forcast for the weekend so I opted to harvest more spuds tonight. The remainder of the desiree (24kg, making a total of 52.8kg) and the rest of one row of pink fir apple (20kg). Some amazing shapes! There’s still another row of PFA and nearly 2 rows of Cara left to come out.

Leek Moth

Thought being at a different site would do away with leek moth problems but I was wrong. The plants look quite badly infected, and rather than loose the lot I’ve taken the decision to use pesticide and keep fingers crossed that it works and secondary infections don’t set in. Harvested half the desiree potatoes (24kg), 7kg of Cara and 7kg of pink fir apple. Yields on the latter far greater than expected, slightly more from the PFA than Cara for the same length of row!  Desiree spuds are all very large, easy to harvest with nearly 100% usable size tubers, some are a bit scabby though.  Cara look to have avoided scab better,  lots of good size potatoes.  PFA are all shapes and sizes of course!

Loads of beans at the moment. Autumn King carrots are getting huge, pulled one whopper from the garden today, enough for a meal in itself. Still harvesting Kohl Rabi, which are now massive but not pithy yet which is very pleasing. Hooligan pumpkins are ripening nicely, doesn’t look like many squashes have formed this year. The aubergines are finally looking productive, interestingly the plants in smaller pots have the most/largest fruit, the ones with more compost have hardly any fruit at all

Sweetcorn are slow to ripen this year, and yeilds dissapointing considering the number of plants, only really getting one smallish cob per plant.

Green sprouting brocolli is very good, good yields at the moment and will definately do this another year.

Loads of cape gooseberries!!

Green tomato chutney time!

All the outdoor toms have blight, so I’ve harvested everything green and collected a few windfalls for chutney. The pink fir apple potatoes were showing brown spots on the leaves, so I took the desicion to wait no longer and have cut the tops off the enire potato crop. They’ve had 21 weeks 2 days to grow so hopefully there will be a respectable yield. Will now wait a couple of weeks before harvesting. Hooligan pumpkins look to be developing nicely, although not many of them.