Cold frame

I put together a temporary cold frame thing...

2nd batch of spuds in

I planted another 3 Pentland Javelins today...

First spuds in!

Today I planted the first Pentland Javelins. As I don't want a glut of potatoes, I planted 3 seed potatoes, I'll plant some more later to hopefully stagger the cropping. I planted the spuds in a raised bed which was once the site of a compost heap, so the soil should be fertile. This area gets full sun for most of the day. I dug a trench about 8 feet long, should be able to fit in 8 or 9 potatoes eventually.
























This is the current state of chitting of the Pentlands -



















...and these are the 3 intrepid candidates for first planting, together with a piece of cane cunningly marked at the 5 inch point as a depth tester -



















Here's the first one in place, before being buried alive -



















After planting 3 spuds I left a marker cane to show the position of the third so I know where to space the next batch -


























and finally I installed anti-fox measures -

Strawbs now planted

Here's a look at my strawberry bed with the new plants added to those that were already growing. You can see that the existing plants are much smaller than those I just planted. I grew the existing plants from seed over the last couple of years. Getting strawberry seeds to germinate is really difficult, which is why I bought potted up plants to fill the gap in the bed. Although the existing plants are small, in the last couple of years they've produced quite a lot of fruit, continuously from June to about October (by which point I'm fed up with picking them, anyway). Will be interesting to see how the new plants compare in fruit production.

btw the experts say you should remove the netting while there is no fruit so that the birds can eat any pests that might be lurking, however I hate to think what the foxes would do if I took the netting off the bed...

Strawbs!

Bought 4 stawberry plants today - one of each of

Pegasus

Alice

Elsanta

Honeoye

The plants look really healthy

What a fantastic day to start my spud blog - perfect spring weather.








I'm intending to record my potato-growing activities here for my own records (although I expect I will drift into other areas as the whim takes me).

I've never attempted to grow spuds before, so it may all go horribly wrong.



Last week I bought a bag of seed potatoes at £3.99 for 2.5kgs, which is way more than I need, but there were no smaller bags. The book and web advice is that seed potatoes are disease-resistant, unlike those that you buy to eat. I wanted to grow Charlotte potatoes, but they didn't have that variety among the seed potatoes at my local garden centre, so I chose Pentland Javelin (I have no idea what they taste like). However, when I was in Somerfield last Friday I saw a bag of Charlottes, so I bought them and am now 'chitting' a few of them - that's the process of leaving them in the light so that they sprout.





I'm intending to plant the Charlottes in refuse sacks, using compost which I bought (all will hopefully become clear later), so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that using commercial compost will mean they're not as likely to be exposed to disease as those planted in the soil - time will tell whether that's true.







Exciting, innit?