This year’s potato harvest was always going to be something of a mixed bag, as you can see from this pic of the main Plot #59 potato patch, taken a couple of weeks ago: On the right: Solanum tuberosum ‘Swift’, a previously reliable first early variety, which this year doesn’t seem to have performed. The […]
Tag: potato
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A Quick Mid-June Plot #59 Photo Update
Phew! That’s the exams done and dusted. Until I start the next RHS Level Two course in September and sit the next set of exams in February 2017, that is. My pre-exam weekend was spent down the allotment, on the grounds that I’d already crammed about as much into my head as was going to […]
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Plot #59 Update: April 2016
“April is the cruellest month,” said T. S. Eliot, in the opening line of his epic poem ‘The Wasteland’. He could well have been referring to the tricks that April seems to enjoy playing with the weather. Last year April served up a prolonged, scorching heatwave, followed by a thoroughly miserable, damp cold-snap. This year […]
After a properly lazy day on soggy Saturday, I was back down the plot on Sunday afternoon to enjoy a burst of Spring sunshine (albeit tempered by some distinctly northerly breezes) and to get the last of this year’s potatoes in the ground. Having already dug and manured trenches and planted out my first early […]
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Plot #59 Update: March 2016
The weather in our neck of the woods was distinctly variable during March, although thankfully storm Katie largely passed us by. A couple of dry weeks meant I could go full steam ahead on digging and clearing the back section of the plot, for a while. We haven’t worked this bit since we took it […]
January is the traditional time to post a year-in-review piece, but for me, the start of the sowing and growing season – with the last of the previous year’s over-wintered veg crops being harvested or cleared away and the first of this year’s plants being sown and planted out – seems a good time to […]
A couple of weeks ago I took delivery of this year’s seed spuds from our allotment shop. Now, I know it’s perfectly possible to grow new spud plants from supermarket spuds, or even from spud peelings, as long as there’s a decent eye, but I do prefer to stick my hand in my pocket and […]