Tag Archives: Belle de Fontenay

Potato Daze

Get in Line…

The gardening year – or more pertinently the planning thereof – starts for me with Potato Day at Caryford Hall.  The marquee event of January, Jules and I delayed the start of our golf round to make sure we could be there to select our first chitters of the new decade.  Always a red letter day in the gardening calendar, I made sure I was there soon after opening but was stunned to see barely a space in the car park.  Surely the horticultural fraternity was not THAT desperate to get first dibs on their desirees?   I deposited my car on the last spare bit of gravel and only then did I realise that there was a junior football match in progress nearby.  Honestly:  Cary Rangers and Potato Day being scheduled at the same time?  I’ll have a word with local traffic control.  It’s the CAry equivalent of scheduling Merseyside fixtures at Anfield and Goodison at 3pm on a Saturday.  Total madness – took me nearly five minutes to find a parking spot and, as I left, they were parking in the front of the school and ALL the way down Maggs Lane.  Honestly – it’s enough to make a neigbour post on Facebook.

I swam my way against the tide of Ugg-booted mums and gum-chewing dads and washed ashore in the hallowed sanctuary of Seed Potato Heaven where the hushed voices of woolly-hatted gardeners lent an ecclesiastical air to proceedings.  But the reality was not as calm as it seemed.  As I lined up, there was a clear undercurrent of competition to get to the best coloured trugs laid out before us.  Choosing potatoes should be a well-ordered activity, with everyone collecting their brown paper bags and sharpies (for labelling) before queueing, starting at A (for ‘Abbot’ and ‘Accent’) and moving along in a patient, well-orderd shuffle to the end of the row (‘Wilja’ and ‘Yukon Gold’).  But this year there seemed to be a faction of more serious hard-edged gardeners moving into the line, blocking off movement as they delved for the potatoes they particularly wanted.  It was subtle and deliberate with an air of what Simon Barnes called the “Bull Elephant Syndrome”.  These determined gardeners eased their way to the trugs like the dominant elephant at the watering hole, while the rest of the herd made way and moved along in their orderly line, waiting without complaint.

I smiled at the seriousness of the mood amongst some of my fellow horticulturalists, but there was light relief to be had at the stall with secondhand garden tools, where there was an impressive array of refurbished secateurs and hardware.  A cheeful chap was offering them at discount prices so I picked up a particularly vicious hack saw which I was jovially told had a japanese blade.  When I put it together with its bamboo-style handle it had the feel of something from the set of The Bridge Over the River Kwai.  Any POW armed with this tool could have reduced the infamous Bridge to sawn lengths in minutes.  I asked the price and was delighted to walk away with a Samurai Saw for three quid.

As for spuds, I tried to keep my spending to a minimum,with Mrs B’s warnings in my head to go for only earlies (“The main crop never keeps” she told me) so I started out by doing that, before giving in to tempation and buying a bag of Sarpo Mira (“they’re blight resistant” was my excuse).  For a variety of earlies I went with my favourtites – Belle de Fontenay, Duke of York for topicality (small, pink and very tasty – the way the Duke likes them).  There was also the compulsory Arran Victory and this year’s untried, left field choice is Piccolo Star.  It’s the Samuel Beckett chitter:  apparently it’s good in tubs, so I might plant up a couple of dustbins.  And then just wait…

“That’s not a knife…”
Wating for Chitters

 

 

The First Lift

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Potatoes – Swift and early. But where have all the flowers gone?

These are the days of miracle and wonder, as Paul Simon once sang. The garden is starting to produce, and all the fastidious work sowing seeds, potting on, planting out, weeding, hoeing and slaughtering snails, begins to pay off.

One of the key moment is the lifting of the first root of New Potatoes. It is something that was treated with due pomp and ceremony by The Old Man and required the type of careful prodding and inspection one would normally expect only of a midwife.  The Old Man would have counted the days since planting, checked the growing conditions and attempted to calculate the exact best day to start digging.  But he traditionally only planted one type of potato (probably Wilja or Desiree), meaning that those dug in June were new potatoes, anything after that were main crop.

For my part, I am always seduced by the choice on offer at Pennard Plants Potato days so I buy various types for different end products.  But every year I am unsure about when they are likely to be ready.  The sages of the internet gardening fraternity say you need to start harvesting when the potatoes have stopped flowering, but this May / June has been so dry they seem to have barely blossomed.  And this has been a very different this year for other reasons:

  1. The potato patch (and veg patch) is only a few strides from my back door in the new property
  2. Due to a lack of supply we had to go for Swift first earlies instead of the usually reliable Belle de Fontenay
  3. In an even more radical break with normal procedures, earthing up has been done not with earth, but with grass clippings, thanks to reading an article by Alyce Fowler.

So the timing of when the first spuds would be ready was even more of a guessing game than normal.  However, the three variables noted above were more likely to help rather than hinder.  Point one makes it less time-consuming to check them, point two suggested that the they would be ready earlier (or else why give them a name synonymous with fast) and point three, after some initial misgivings, was the most beneficial of all.  With the dry weather, I was able to simply lift a portion of grass clippings to expose the golden orbs that indicated the potatoes were ready.

And so we enjoyed our first potatoes of the season along with the first kale of the year too.  The kale should have been ready much earlier, but it was a victim of unknown assailants – like the peas and salad.  But, on the whole, there is enough greenery to suggest a good growing season beckons.

Snug under their blanket of grass clippings
The First Root – ready for prepping