Sunday, 18 April 2010

Potatoes are in

This week has turned out to be rather hectic and it is already Wednesday! The weekend was just incredile, two days of sunshine and as it looks set to stay. I finally got around to planting the potatoes, which turned out to be a bit more stenuous than I had anticipated. Somehow the potato area always seems to need to be twice as big as I planned but after 3 hours of digging and lining and measuring I had the four rows planted up. No doubt we'll see just ho9w wobbly my lines are when they start growing!

This year I bought my potatoes from the local garden centre, mainly because of the cost of postage, this limited choice a little but I have Charlotte as usual and Desiree for Maincrop. I don't think the quality of the potatoes is as good as the ones I have had in previous years, the chitting was certainly slow but hopefully now they're in the ground they'll get to work.

At the same time as buying the potatoes I treated myself to a bag of Shallots, it was quite late to be buying shallots so I started them off in modules and planted them out this weekend. They have put on great growth and had excellent roots so hopefully they'll cope with the transplanting and I'll be on course for a bumper shallot harvest (well you gotta hope).

The coldframe is almost full so I have started to harden off the salad leaves, white beetroot, leeks and celeriac which should mean that I can sow some more seeds this weekend. Finally it seems the growing season is on the go.

1 comment:

Jo said...

I bought my potatoes by mail order this year, just for the choice really, but I've noticed that my local nursery do a great choice, and I could have actually bought all the ones I chose from them, so it's settled for next year, no more mail order.