The month began with average or slightly below average temperature but for the last week or more it's been very mild for late February. Our main crop seed potatoes went into the garage in a paper sack to keep them in the cold and dark to stop them sprouting. Obviously in recent days the cold bit hasn't been appropriate so I thought I'd better check them over. It was a good job I did as they were nearly all starting to sprout.
Left in the dark in the garage these shoots would get long and leggy as the new shoot searches for light. So the condition of the potatoes made up my mind for me. They need to be placed in good light to produce good strong healthy shoots instead of weak and straggly ones.
All our potatoes have been moved from the garage into the greenhouse. They've got a couple of layers of fleece to give them a bit of frost protection. I'm sure now I've moved them into the greenhouse we'll get some cold and frosty nights.
I did check out our special individual potato tubers which have been kept in the summerhouse since we bought them.
These too have started to sprout but as they have been kept in better light the shoots are green rather than white. I'm not intending to plant out any of our seed potatoes until the middle of April at the earliest. We do have a few extra Casablanca first early tubers that won't be needed to plant up our first early bed of potatoes so I might plant up a couple of potato sacks to see if I can get a very early crop of tasty new potatoes.
We got a taster through Tuesday night into Wednesday morning of what is to come. It was wet and windy through the night although the gale force winds have abated a little bit on Wednesday morning.
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| Temperature, Rainfall & High Wind Speed Records 20-22 February 2017 |
If the weather models and forecasters are correct storm "Doris" looks like it will produce the worst storm of the winter arriving on Thursday morning and lasting into the afternoon.
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Mine aren't doing anything just sitting on top of the refrigerator. What next? Lovely map. I wonder if that's the same storm system that gave us our "30" year storm a few days ago?
ReplyDeleteWhat's sitting on the refrigerator? If it's potatoes they can be planted without them chitting. Getting ready for a very stormy day on Thursday.
DeleteDown here in the "sunny" South we can get away with planting potatoes much earlier than you. I plan to put my first ones in during the early part of March (in containers, which are easier to protect from frost if need be).
ReplyDeleteI'm sure someone on our site will be planting them in March just like it says on the instruction. I think they survive the cold okay but a wet spell of weather and they rot.
DeleteI see that you have had a power outage. Sure messes up the precip totals, doesn't it? Happened to me last storm, too.
ReplyDeleteHi Jane
DeleteWe haven’t suffered a power outage I just had a computer glitch of some sort. If we do have a power outage my weather station has a battery backup and stores data until it can be downloaded to my PC.
We’re still waiting for the arrival of storm Doris. It’s 09:00am (Thursday morning) and the worst of the storm is due over the next 9 hours. The storm developed in the Atlantic last night off the west coast of Ireland and will track eastwards across the UK and out into the North Sea by the end of Thursday. I think we will get the worst of the weather through Thursday afternoon.