Good crops, bad crops

Of course everyone who has ever watched a detective show on TV knows about "good cop bad cop", where one detective is nasty to the suspect (ie, the bad cop) while the other one (the good cop) offers the "perp" a drink and a kind word, in the hope that the suspect spills the beans to the nice detective before the bad one gets seriously upset and starts turning off the tape recorder and throwing chairs around the interview room.

What's this got to do with growing vegetables, you ask? Well, I suspect my vegetables are trying to work me over. My potatoes are my bad cop, my spinach is the nice guy. I think they want me to grow fewer potatoes and more spinach, but my mind doesn't work that way. I like eating both of them, so I am going to continue growing both of them, despite my dud crop of spuds trying to play the bad crop.

What do I mean by "dud crop of spuds?" Well, this is all of them. Not even one colander full. I was rather hoping for a few kilograms, and all I ended up with is far too many one-inch tiddler mini spuds and only a dozen or so "proper-sized" Kind Edward potatoes. Here's what happened ...

Back in mid-October, the potato plants started to do their usual thing of looking ugly. That's OK, potato crops do that. The foliage is meant to slowly die off while, underground, countless dozens of little spudettes turn into enormous great big spuds.

A month later, by mid-November, the plants looked like they'd done their dash, and so I harvested the lot ...

... and couldn't even fill one lousy colander. It's not as if this is my first go at growing spuds. I've done it a few times before, sometimes growing them in the ground and other times in bags. And I grew them this time using the same methods as before. Of course I could turn around and blame my seed potato supplier, but that would be churlish (however, I have resolved not to order from that same supplier next year, just as a precaution). Never fear though, this potato-loving boy will be back next season, hoping for a better result.

Meanwhile, in the very same patch of ground, and right next door to the dud spuds, my long-lasting crop of perpetual spinach had reached peak abundance, so I harvested the lot before our forecast scorching hot 41°C Friday hits us.

Ever the experimenter, several months ago I spotted a red-stemmed variety of perpetual spinach in amongst the more regular green types at the local nursery, so I have given that a try. Perpetual spinach isn't English spinach, and it isn't silver beet, and it isn't ruby chard. It's a close relative of all these, but it has the lovely quality of simply lasting a long time in the ground.

When the leaves are young and small we pick them as colourful little extras in a leafy green salad. Later on, once the number of leaves gets ahead of us and they mature into bigger leaves, we've been picking several at a time for cooking as a spinach side dish. (My favourite is to simply stir-fry it, along with currants (or sultanas) and pine nuts.)

The flavour is closer to English spinach than the more pungent silver beet/chard, but the main benefit of this is the way it lasts and lasts through all the winter months and spring. Once summer's heat comes along it's a goner, bolting to seed, but I've given up growing short-lived English spinach and rely instead on this. I'm not sure of its botanical name, but it's sold in nurseries around here as perpetual spinach, so give it a try once the worst of summer has passed.

And so, even if my vegie patch wants me to grow more spinach, I'm not taking the bait. Next year I will spud-up again, and there'll be trouble if there ain't a bumper crop!



   

Bagging up some spuds

I reckon I must have some Inca blood in my family. Or maybe I just love spuds a lot, and so here I am again, growing spuds at home, this time in a proper 'tatey bag' from Diggers Seeds. 

I ordered mine a while ago, and in mild old inner-western Sydney, where there's never any danger of frosts damaging the baby plants, I figured this warm patch of early-spring weather we're enjoying now is a good time to get my seed potatoes planted in their bag.

First of all, we need some motivation, so here's some of the last crop of King Edward potatoes we grew here at Jamie and Pam's Garden Amateur-land.

Blushed pink, King Edward potatoes are fine all-rounder
spuds, great for chips, roasting or baking in their jackets, and
their fluffy texture produces a truly wonderful mash.

What follows is yet another exhaustive step-by-step of how I do it. Remember though that there are several other methods for growing spuds in a bag, so if somebody tells you that it can be done another way, they're probably right!

Some kind of straw is very handy, especially to form the
base on which your seed potatoes will sit inside the bag.
This is ordinary sugar cane mulch, which worked fine last
time, and which is plentiful and cheap here.

Use home-made compost by all means, but I am giving my
other Tatey bag and half my seed potatoes to a friend, Jolanda,
and so she is going to use this compost to grow her spuds.

Yes, you can use ordinary potting mix, too. But we didn't.

Compost itself is a fabulous gentle fertiliser,
so down the bottom of the bag, where the
roots will go searching for food, I will be adding
a handful of chicken poo. This time I am
using the "reduced odour" version of Dynamic
Lifter, which somewhat spoils the fun of the
whole exercise, but Jolanda's eight-year-old
daughter Elina thought the reduced odour chicken
poo was pretty disgusting, so it's certainly
not odour free.

This is the 'Tatey bag' Diggers provides. It measures
(roughly) 40cm tall, wide and high, and the handles are handy.

The tatey bags come with plenty of holes both in the bottom
and the sides, so water can drain away. You can of course
grow potatoes in a pot, but just make sure it has plenty of
drainage holes in the bottom (not just one, as some poorer
quality big ceramic pots sometimes have). The big plastic
pots usually have plentiful drainage holes.

OK, so they're your ingredients to form the bottom layer of the pot: straw, compost and chicken poo, plus a bag with lots of holes in the bottom.

For the bottom layers, I mix together several big handfuls
of straw with the same quantity of compost.

Then I fill the bag about 10cm deep with my straw and
compost mix. Then I sprinkle a handful of chicken poo over
the top, then cover that chicken poo with another 10cm of
straw and compost. This is an important point: don't let your
seed potatoes come into direct contact with the fertiliser,
so bury your fertiliser deeper than the seedling spuds.
The seedling spuds! Here they are, at last!

Here they are in their paper bag. They've already sprouted.
This is a good thing, not a bad thing. They'll grow quickly
now they are nestled into the rich planting soil. 

Generally, it's a good idea to let your seed potatoes sprout before planting them (this is the process of "chitting" that you might read about). It's not absolutely essential, but it is desirable. You can just plant your seed potatoes even if they haven't sprouted, but they might take a bit longer to get going if they haven't sprouted before planting.  

Place the seed potatoes with the sprouts facing upwards.
I've put four seed potatoes into the bag, and that's about the
maximum to plant in this kind of space.

Finally, I then covered the seed potatoes with more compost.
If you have mixed up too much compost and straw, it is
totally OK to cover the seed potatoes with more compost
and straw, of course. In fact, some potato growers like to
grow their spuds mostly in straw.

Water the bag well with at least half a can of water, and keep the soil in the bag lightly moist. Right now it's still late winter and the temperatures aren't too high, so watering the bag every third day will probably be enough. Later on, as the weather warms up, watering every second day might become the routine.

The best place to put your potato bag is a sunny spot, and that means one which gets at least six hours a day of sunshine, or the closest you can get to six hours.

As for when the first green shoots appear, it could take a couple of weeks or more. Just keep an eye on what happens.

I'm going to update my "spuds in a bag" blog when there is news to report, and I expect about a month from now there'll be a bit more work to do to keep things rolling along.

If you decide to have a go yourself, you can buy everything you need from Diggers Seeds (diggers.com.au) but your local garden centre or major hardware chain garden centre (eg, Bunnings, Mitre 10 etc) also stock "seed potatoes", so you could buy a pack of them and try your hand at potato growing in a large pot, or of course in the ground itself.

Whatever you decide, good luck.

Happy accidents at the potato patch

I can't take any credit for the excellent confusion I have caused in my potato patch, but I am delighted at the prospect of how the next month or two of spud harvesting might pan out. It all began the other day with the sudden decline of just one plant in the potato patch. It had been obviously damaged by something, as it had almost snapped off where it poked out of 'The Hill' and was rapidly going yellow and shrivelling up. A recent windy day is the likely culprit, but the constant backyard midnight cat fights cannot be entirely ruled out. There was no alternative – an early one-plant harvest was called for.

And this is some of what came out of the hill. King Edward potatoes, now washed and in the pink of good health, even if a few of them are still just babies. Total weight of the premature harvest was about 900g, not too bad for a lot of tiddlers plus a few teens and not many adults.

I love that pink skin of the King Edwards. Soon after pulling them out of the hill I washed a couple, boiled one and par-boiled the other then pan-fried it. Yummy all round, both ways!

Here's The Hill where the King Edward clan lived. It's roughly a 50:50 blend of home-made compost and sugar cane mulch, and as I bandicooted around inside the hill looking for Kings in Hiding the soil felt cool, soft and just lightly moist. Lovely earth.

The other potato plants are either still flowering, or have just finished flowering, so from everything I've read they're still a long way from being ready to harvest. I had read that you can start bandicooting around for baby spuds after the plants stop flowering, but if you want a maximum-size, full-flavoured crop, wait until the plants start to fade away. So my premature crop of King Edwards confirms all that, as most of them were still babies. Here's one of the other plants, and it's still green and lovely and lush.

On the other side of the patch some potato plants are still flowering, so they won't be feeding me for a couple of months, I expect. The fact that some are flowering and some finished a week or three back makes me suspect that they are different varieties. At the end of the blog I'll explain how I managed to not have a clue what variety is growing where...

While I was taking a snap this afternoon of the flowers and the hill, a ladybird wandered into the frame.

And while it's not the clearest action shot you'll ever see, the ladybird then decided I was mere garden paparazzi and didn't want to be on the cover of Ladybirds 4 Lads.

The wonderful stuff-up of this potato patch is all a result of my impatience and impetuosity. Simply, I'm not sure what potatoes I'll get until I pull them out of the hill. I was expecting a Kennebec today, and I got a King Edward!

Let me explain. I wanted to grow Kennebec potatoes, because I have very fond memories (from living in Tassie in the late 1970s) of Kennebecs baked in their jackets at a Steakhouse in Ulverstone, run by a mate of mine. When I ordered my spuds earlier this year I ordered far too many, going for Kennebecs, King Edwards and Dutch Creams. Just one bag of seed potatoes would have been enough. I ended up with three bags and realised my mistake when I read up on potato growing after ordering the spuds. Oh dear!

Then the Kennebecs wouldn't sprout for me in my little 'chitting' spot. The King Edwards and Dutch Creams did sprout fairly readily, so I planted them. Very, very belatedly, the Kennebecs did sprout a few weeks later, and as none of the other spuds already planted had yet appeared above soil level, I thought "what the hell, Kennebecs in too". So I dug around a bit, yanked out a couple of the others to make way for some Kennebecs, and planted some of the sprouted Kennebecs.

What I've ended up with is a mixture of all three types in a tiny little potato patch that's just 1.5m x 1.5m. I'm not sure which plant is which. I've downloaded some excellent potato mug shots from my supplier, Tasmanian Gourmet Potatoes – http://taspotatoes.com.au – so I'll find out what I'm having for dinner that night when they finally come out of the Hill, and no earlier. Kind of makes it more fun, actually, but that doesn't make hopeless confusion a great plan or anything...