Monday 16 June 2014

A Tale of Two Potato Patches

Spuds in flower
No allotmenteering for us this weekend gone as we were away in Scarborough (of which more in due course), but I did manage to sneak in a few post-work hours down there on Wednesday of last week.


It was a bucolic scene; the early evening sun was plenty warm, making for very agreeable weeding conditions. And weed I did, clearing out undesirables from onion, spud, broad bean, shallot and garlic patches. Around this time last year we let things get pretty damn weedy. As we've now got nearly all our patches planted up I'm determined to keep things a bit tidier. Being as the weather had been so arrid, I gave everything a good soak. None of this makes for very exciting news, hence lack of pics.


One thing of note however is that some of our spuds are doing - or at least appear to be doing - noticeably better than others. The patch above is Maris Peer 2nd earlies. There's a few gaps where some haven't come up at all, and those that have look a bit puny.


Contrast that with these King Edward main croppers, all of which have come up and are putting on impressive growth, standing to attention. Both were bought from Wilkos, both put into patches that were fed the same amount of manure at roughly the same time. What's that all about?


5 comments:

  1. It's so strange you saying your ground is arid - we are needing ours to dry out a bit,

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Isn't it! Just goes to show how variable conditions can be across the north. Our plot does seem to drain very well though, and, being clay, goes from claggy to dry brick in no time.

      Delete
    2. Ours is clay too and does exactly the same. The bad news is that we spotted the first signs of blight on some of our potatoes today.

      Delete
  2. my 2nd earlies aren't flowering either, but mains are, strange isn't it!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Snap! The proof of the potato will be in the digging...

      Delete

All comments gratefully received. Sorry about the word verification thing, but I've started getting bombed by spam.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...