Friday wasn't as forecast, a bit disappointing as the warmer sunnier weather didn't happen. It was cloudy all day until early evening when the sun managed to make a brief appearance.
For most of the day the temperature hovered around the 14°C mark disappointingly low after the forecast for warmer temperatures. As the sun came out early evening the temperature peaked before falling away rapidly.
The weather didn't stop me from digging up the last of our potatoes. Those planted in plot 30, as a sort of backup to our main crop,were disappointing. I couldn't really find any potatoes on one row of Swifts planted in this bed.
On the other hand our rather experimental late planting of potatoes on 16 June 2013 turned out to be a success. One big factor has been that there hasn't been any blight which would have cut the potatoes back at the end of July or early August as it does in many years.
There was still plenty of green foliage on the plants but I thought it was about time I got them lifted. There’s plenty of tidying up to do on the plot before any bad weather sets in so I decided it was time to see how our experiment had performed. It’s worth noting that these were left over tubers that were planted and they weren't the biggest or best of the seed potatoes which had already been picked over a couple of times for our main plantings. They could just as easily have been dumped and not planted.
The variety was Nicola and I was pleasantly surprised by the quantity and quality of the potatoes. The potatoes were damage free and a good size and the equal of any I've lifted this year.
By the time they were all lifted I’d 26kg of potatoes in these three boxes not bad from some seed potato that were left forgotten about in the plot greenhouse for a couple of months and could just as easily have been thrown away.
It does show that potatoes planted as late as the middle of June will produce a very good crop of potatoes if, and it’s a very big if, there’s no blight. Perhaps we just chose a good year for the experiment.
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Wow, that's a fantastic crop. I am always optimistic that there won't be any blight. Usually I'm disappointed! But your late planting has done superbly, definitely worth trying this again I think.
ReplyDeleteAnd should I risk outdoor tomatoes again - another crop usually lost to blight? Decisions Decisions!
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