I have decided not plant potatoes in any of the raised beds but instead to plant them in bags on the terrace. I am very lucky as I have a large garden but I have also lived in an apartment and a house with a small garden so I want to do something that those of you without lots of space can do also. I’ll be focusing a lot on container gardening as time goes on and I hope it’s useful.
In March I had three varieties of seed potatoes delivered – Charlotte, Vivaldi and Swift. You can see the little shoots growing out of them. I placed them all in individual trays, shoots facing upwards as best I could, and kept them in a moderate temperature with some light.
Now they look like this…
The shoots have turned in to sprouts, they are larger and they are also now green in colour. They are officially ‘well chitted’. How nice!
I have one bag for each of my potato varieties and yesterday Jodie filled each of them with 10 cm of all purpose compost and placed the seed potatoes on top of it.
As you can see the sprouts are all facing upwards.
All you have to do then is cover with another 10 cm of compost and water with three litres of water being careful not to disturb the potatoes when you do so.
And then…………
Well, I’ll be back with a potato update very soon but as far as I can tell I’m going to really enjoy working with these bags. I bought the whole lot as a kit and I would highly recommend them if you’d like to have a go at growing your own but have limited space.
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LATEST UPDATE!!!!!
These were our potatoes on 6 May 2010
And these were them on 24 June 2010…
We finally harvested our potatoes on 6th July 2010 – around 13 weeks after planting. To harvest we pulled all of the leaves from the soil and then emptied the soil out onto a large sheet of plastic and just picked out our crop of potatoes.
A good way to know if the potatoes are ready to be harvested is to look at the leaves, if they are starting to droop and turning slightly yellow in colour, they are more than likely ready. Depending on the variety of the potatoes, the plants may also start to flower and this is also a good sign to show that they are ready to be picked.
We were left with some very healthy looking potatoes at the end of our harvest and they tasted pretty darn good too.
You can see how we cooked our potatoes here.
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[...] it happened we also harvested the three varieties of potatoes that we have grown in bags this summer. I decided to use some of the Charlotte’s for our supper that [...]