Tag Archives: Seed potatoes

The (non) Frost report

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Things are looking good in the garden, the clematis (above) is flowering profusely this year after a couple of years of not doing much. We once heard on Gardeners Question Time if you threaten a plant with a “final cut with a pair of secateurs” it can do the trick but it’s not something you want to do as it doesn’t seem right. Nature just did its thing with the clematis.

The bottom part of the garden has now vegetables starting to germinate (the sticks keep the cat out) even though the home-made plant labels have the touch of small gravestones if viewed at the right angle.

And we remember the late great Joe Maiden mentioning on the BBC Leeds gardening programme many moons ago that Good Friday is traditionally when you plant your seed spuds. These cara potatoes are starting to sprout now, and we’ll be earthing them up as that hopefully will keep them protected if there is a threat of frost over this weekend.

Happy Easter everyone and we hope you get the Easter eggs you desired. There was a bloke we worked with once when asked what he thought of Green & Blacks 70% chocolate and “quality” chocolate he replied, “I’m a cheap easter egg bought at the local market type chocolate person myself, none of that posh stuff, real chocolate”. And on that note…

Surprise Spuds!

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Cheers to Debby H for sending us a message: “We found a small cardboard box in one of our cupboards recently. It had strange shoots coming out of the ends. Upon opening it we saw two small potatoes that had sprouted. We had forgotten that we stored them away last autumn to be used as seed potatoes. We planted them in a flower pot and now they are growing quite well.” Brilliant stuff and hope they give a good harvest.

Talking of potatoes, one of the things with growing spuds in the soil outside is leaving a few small ones in there even if you think you have pulled every one up. Then come the year after, you get  “volunteers” sprouting up. We wonder could these volunteers be moved and would they give you a good harvest. Your thoughts please.

And back to Debby H’s garden here’s the daffodils and primroses that are doing well. Cheers Debby!

Garden updates are always welcomed here. Send any pics to one deck pete (at symbol) geemail dot com.

Spring has spung?

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We’re supposed going to be seeing highs of 19°C today in SE23 with a bit of a high wind and drizzle, madness! Looking around the garden this morning (to the beautiful audio background of swearing scaffolders working on the estate behind the bottom of our garden), it looks like sprung may have really sprung this time. Those seed spuds we put under the bin bags the other week (above) are starting to sprout (we had to lift the plastic to find the sprouts at first and give them some guidance) and there’s progress in the ones under the window frame even from a couple of days ago (below).

And meanwhile in Portland, Maine …

Thanks to our good radio/music friend Justin Patrick Moore for passing on a photo from his cousin Joseph taken in Portland on Thursday. Crazy weather indeed!

And here’s another in our series of Maunsell Seafort influenced music, a tune from Magic Panda out of Norfolk.

Seed Spuds and Maunsell Sea Forts

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This device above may not the most sophisticated of gardening devices but that old window frame found on a skip many moons ago perched on some bricks is working well as a cold frame.

A few weeks ago we thought we’d chance it with a couple of seed spuds under it and today noticed that they are starting to show through. We put a liitle bit of soil around them (a mini version of earthing up so to speak) just in case a frost decides to show itself. Hopefully in a few weeks we should be in a frost free zone and we’ll take the protection off for good, but until then…

Soundtrack to this post: Big shout to Thomas from the excellent Explorations in Dub for sending us this track out of Poland called Streams of bubbling dub from Muflon Dub Soundsystem and a nice chilled bit of dub it is.

 

And through the Explorations in Dub blog here we found this great Maunsell Tower dub related track from Banco de Gaia called My Little Country (Rob Bong’s Roughs Tower Dub). Big shout to all the Sealand crew! We do love a seafort here and we are a bit partial to dub too so it’s a winning combination. Cheers again Thomas.

What a difference a day makes (again)

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Saturday was a lovely day so we tipped around in the garden, done some weeding and tidied up. Some seed spuds were sown in the old window frame on bricks (halfway in the picture on the left hand side). The rest of the spuds we procured from B&Q were put in empty egg boxes next to the window in the back room to start off the chitting process.

Come Sunday though, it was grey all day and from mid-morning constant drizzle but one thing with rain, even if you’ve just scratched the top layer of soil in a bed it makes it look great like you’ve spent hours working on it. Viva the good weather!

It’s a bit early doors but…

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We bought some seed potatoes a couple of months ago and they’ve been happily sprouting (AKA chitting) in the back room by the window. As we mention every year, the late great Joe Maiden used to say that Good Friday was traditionally the day to put your seed potatoes in. What with Easter falling early some years it may be better hanging on a couple of weeks when the risk of frost has disappeared but as usual we’re contradicting ourselves.

We’ve grown spuds for a few years but we’re so fed up of scratching about under the surface of the plant looking for early potatoes, leaving a few in when we’ve harvested it and having a few “volunteer” plants grow the next season combined with general impatience we decided we may change the way we grow spuds. We also saw Monty Don on the telly the other week chatting about growing spuds in buckets and tubs so a “lightbulb” moment occured.

This morning we simply stuck a seed potato in a small bucket which was half full with some general purpose peat free compost freshly aquired from Lewisham Lidl. We buried the spud about an inch deep and stuck an old plastic mini cloche over the top. As soon as the shoots come to the surface we’ll put an inch worth of compost over the top and will repeat the process until we’ve filled the bucket. This way at the end of the growing season we will just knock the whole plant out of the bucket with all of the spuds intact. No fuss, no bother. If only life was that simple.

Are we there yet?

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We’ve been away for a few days to sunny Sudbury where the only stress was making sure a couple of cats, the garden birds and the guest ducks were fed and cat treats administered. It was nice to get away for a break after the last couple of years of the on and off madness of lockdown.

When we returned, the garden at home had certainly grown even after 5 days. The spuds we put in early (in February under cover here) were looking well happy and flowering like anything and so was the courgette seedling we put in a big pot (above). One tip, don’t even consider consuming the fruits that may appear on the potato plant after flowering as you’ll certainly keel over. This is how one website put it “…if you are feeling adventurous, you could try tasting a ripe berry, but don’t swallow it unless your health insurance is paid up.” We always knock them off if we see them growing just to be on the safe side.

Now it’s back to that age old “When do we pull the spuds up?” conundrum. It’s all confusing, as far as we can remember these were Golden Wonder maincrop potatoes which you supposed harvest in August/September, but we put them in earlier than they should have been so that’ll make a difference won’t it? If you want to find out more, there’s a good article about the various potato types explained on the Gardener’s World website here.

We usually wait until the flowers and foliage have well died down before we go in with a fork (remembering what Joe Maiden used to say about going in a few times so nothing is left in the ground. “Volunteer” potatoes can muck up an OCD laid out vegetable bed the year after if not) but there’s nothing stopping the impatient digging around in the compost earlier seeing if there’s anything small to harvest. If you’ve got raised beds filled with general purpose compost it shouldn’t take much effort get in there with a trowel and be like a careful archaeologist. If there’s nothing of a decent size just cover them back up and let them get on with it. We’ve read online some people enjoy spuds when they’re marble sized, each to their own we say.

Another thing we actually got around to doing was “side shooting” our tomato plants. This is simply taking out the side shoots that appear between the leaf joint (making sure they’re not the fruit bearing trusses that grow from the stem not on the junction between leaf and stem). The whole idea of doing this, is the plant will put all of its energy into making the fruit rather than into making leaves. If you have a butchers at this video below though the great Bob Flowerdew suggests growing Tomatoes on a couple of main stems. We love the bit that starts at 2.25 “I thought you were a good gardener?”

But the big question here isn’t if he’s a good gardener or not, it’s is he a reggae lover or a Kraftwerk fan or both, we need to know! If anybody knows please tell us.

Something old, something new, something wood

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We’ve been a bit busy in the garden making good use of the lovely weather we’ve been having hence no new posts until now. Today has started gloomy and we’re expected to have a couple of days of this until the weekend when it brightens up again which is great news.

We heard from our good friend across the pond Justin Patrick Moore who has started a new project, something that is brand new to us here at Weeds. It’s a hugelkultur bed. As it says online: “Hugelkultur is a centuries-old, traditional way of building a garden bed from rotten logs and plant debris. These mound shapes are created by marking out an area for a raised bed, clearing the land, and then heaping up woody material (that’s ideally already partially rotted) topped with compost and soil.” http://www.almanac.com

More info here on this different sort of raised bed that made us think initially of the Victorian hot beds. Best of luck with that Justin, do let us know how you get on with it as it sounds great and looks good too!

A couple of years ago a good friend gave us a couple of foxglove plants and they’ve multiplied and starting to come alive this year. Self seeded plants are sometimes a pain (in the case of spuds left in the ground or weeds) but these foxgloves are brilliant, even the one coming out of the brickwork on the garage.

The raised beds by the Dad Corner are starting to burst into life. The seed potatoes that were put in extra early are starting to grow and the overwintered garlic in the 2nd raised bed on the right are well on their way. Shame we didn’t have much luck with the shallots which just withered away. Remember we’re still in May and there’s reports of the odd unexpected frosts about so still keep an eye on the weather forecast for those cold nights and keep those old net curtains handy!

In the wild bit at the bottom which doesn’t get much light where’s there’s a row of spuds, cardoons and some wildflower mix from those beebombs and the odd assortment of cheap seed packets is started to look a bit “wild” instead of looking a bit untended. We’re trying to get it looking wild like the beds at the Horniman’s Gardens (below) which’ll take a few years and a bit of effort but it’s worth trying!

You win some you lose some

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This oddity was found on a garden wall today whilst on a post work walk, a bag of seed spuds that had shoots all over and were well past their sell by date. Can seed potatoes be “over chitted”? Who knows but they weren’t binned. They went into the ground just in case we may get some life out of them. We’ll keep you posted on the outcome. What have we got to lose?

Take a chance on me

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We’ve all heard stories of keen gardeners on seeing the sun in the early months of the year getting the seeds out or travelling to the local garden centre to buy plants. Then come the day after the seeds or plants have been put in, the weather changes and then there’s a frost.

We’re not immune to it here at Weeds even though we know the risk. Over the last week we’ve had nice sunny days so took a chance to stick a couple of the seed spuds in the raised bed which has protection from some plastic and another couple under some old seed propagator tops weighed down so they don’t get blown away by the cold winds. Fingers crossed if we get snow they may be protected. It’s worth taking a chance, you’ve only got a couple of seed potatoes to lose if the weather gets too cold. (Please) roll on spring.