Community › Community › General Gardening › Vegetables › Storing potatoes with mild scab…… › 5 Hessian sacks ordered from JBA today!
We’ll store the Picasso, Desiree and Sarpo Mira separately over winter then.
The Desirees grown normally in the ground were harvested today after following a moon-based calendar for planting, earthing up and feeding potassium prior to harvest at a few days shy of 20 weeks (on another root day).
They were entirely free of scab, the odd one had slug damage and, apart from two plants which clearly went downhill early and hence yielded less than 2lb of potatoes per tuber, the other ten were fantastic and the overall yield from 12 tubers in 3 rows of 4 tubers across a 1.5m bed was 35lb. The rows were only spaced 50cm apart too, so you can clearly get very satisfactory yields in the home garden spacing maincrop closer than many of the books tell you to. Two plants yielded 4lb each and several yielded 3.5lb. It was the best harvest of maincrop potatoes I’ve had yet, which says that Charles’ bed preparation practices work even if you do dig trenches too (manure overlaid in November and dug in in early March prior to planting in April). I added extra comfrey leaves and grass along with soil at earthing up time and this clearly didn’t do any harm. The worm population was plentiful and vigorous as I dug up the potatoes – long may it remain that way!
So, with just 2 Sarpo Mira pots left to harvest from the 5m * 1.5m potato experiment, the cumulative yield to date is 110lb and a few ounces, which is very gratifying when trying to become self-sufficient in potatoes using only one 7.5sqm bed.