I was lamenting recently that I’d lost control of the garden. Well thanks to the motivation provided by a few visitors, an upcoming Christmas party and a little bit of help from Sarah at Kitchen Adventures, I am getting it a bit more under control.
The ugliest part of the garden was perhaps the tired potato bed out the back. Liz mentioned that she thought that it might have been ready to dig up, which honestly hadn’t occurred to me. It has now been 21 weeks since planting and this afternoon I thought it was time to clean the place up.
So I dug while J gathered, and it reminded me so much of doing the same thing as a kid. I really didn’t realise back then just how much of a raw deal it is to be the parent digging, rather than the kid scrambling after the little treasures. I managed about half of the bed before admitting defeat and enlisting P to to the rest of the digging (while I joined in the scrambling).
I don’t actually have any photos of the harvesting (we were having too much fun), but in the end we had ourselves 9 kilos of potatoes. There was a mix of Kipfler (the little salad potatoes) Dutch Cream (regular-sized white ones) and Royal Blue (purple on the outside, white in the middle).
Tonight I made a few of the royal blues into some mash. They really were amazing – not sure if it was the variety or just how fresh they were, but I’ll be planting royal blue again for sure.
A great side effect of the potato growing is the quality of the soil afterwards. The bed was almost entirely filled with mulch and blood and bone, so digging the bed over was just amazing. So much richness and organic matter – I can’t wait to put something else into the bed now.
I think if the potatoes hadn’t suffered the massive caterpillar attack and therefore been pulled up a bit early, then we would have had a lot more. This potato growing thing is as fun as I remembered!
Now does anyone know if I would get away with planting another crop now, or is it too late?
500m2 in Sydney 