Monday, 15 June 2009

Pride before a fall

After the massive confidence boost of Saturday's potato find, we thought it would be nice to enjoy some of the beautiful potatoes with last night's dinner. So Emily and I headed off to the container where the Red Duke of Yorks are growing. Emily was holding the little basket ready for taking our treasures back to the house. I explained the rules of engagement, just in case: "If we only find small ones then we stop looking". After quite a bit of tentative searching in the potato equivalent of a lucky dip, this is what I found:
two tiny spuds
Not the biggest potatoes we've ever seen

These two monsters measured about 1cm each! Emily was keen to dig up the whole lot in the quest for bigger spuds but I got cold feet and abandoned the whole search. So it was heavy hearts and an empty basket that we headed back to the house. In fact we did find a bigger potato but it was half rotten and old looking - I'm fairly sure it was one of the seed potatoes that got planted originally.

Anyway, not to be out done, I put the tiny little marble-like potatoes in the oven whilst our dinner was cooking. Although they were very small, when they were cooked they still tasted great.

I've since been trying to find out when the potatoes should be ready. Reports vary from 1 week to 3 weeks after the first flowers appear. Now, our flowers appeared a good two weeks ago, and Saturday's potato can't be the only decent one there, surely. Maybe we gave up too soon. I think I'll wait until next weekend and then have a braver search.

4 comments:

  1. After your findings, I'm going to leave my potatoes till 2012 and dig 'em up then.


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  2. I was told by my mum to wait until the flowers turned yellow and died down. It totally depends on the breed, but some potatoes aren't ready til the autumn.

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  3. The Potato Slaya16 June 2009 at 18:39

    I have had a strange smell in the greenhouse for a couple of weeks....I found out today it wasn't my shoes.

    It was my potatoes! They had drowned. And the smell was stagnant water in the bottom of the barrel (and in fact all the way up the barrel) - in hindsight drainage would have been a good idea....I didn't even water them that much either. I'm going to blame the missus :)

    I pulled out the plants and they just slid out of the ground - not even the remains of a potato in sight.

    Lets hope my other pot will make it :) I have actually found potatoes in that pot - tiny but they're there.

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  4. @Potato Slayer - I'm sorry to hear about your potato woes. I've just watered my spuds that are in containers this evening after panicking that they would never swell with out a good drink. I'm hoping they'll be ok.

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