A Passion for Pumpkins... or a Crush on Squashes

SHOCKING HALLOWEEN NEWS...

PUMPKINS ARE FOR EATING. 

THEY'RE NOT ALL ORANGE. 

THEY'RE NOT ALL ROUND.

The winner of the Veg Group's Giant Pumpkin competition was put to good use.
The flesh made pumpkin soup for the children at Sue's school
and the shell was carved into a very realistic likeness of the headteacher (sorry Sue!!!)

I'm actually talking about pumpkins and winter squashes here. To tell the truth, I'm never that impressed with actual pumpkins. I grow just a few, but one giant is normally enough to make all the variants of pumpkin soup I can eat in a year. You can use pumpkins in breads and cakes and they taste very nice, but you use such a small quantity that it doesn't really help when you're trying to use up half a kitchen full of pumpkin.

I much prefer what are known as winter squashes, These come in a bewildering range of shapes and sizes. Their flesh is usually much firmer than that of a pumpkin and the flavour is usually nuttier. They have wonderful names too. Cha Cha, Table Queen, Large Pink Banana, Sweet Dumpling, Amazonika...

I grow a large patch of mixed pumpkins and squashes. In theory they need loads of organic matter in the soil and loads of water, but I pretty much neglect mine and leave then to get on with it on their own. They are easy to raise in the polytunnel and very quickly grow into sturdy little plants. The only tricky bit is planting them out, when the shock of being outside as well as the threat of being munched by slugs can result in a few losses. However, I have largely avoided this by using tree protectors over them until their roots have obviously gotten hold and they start to grow strongly.

2015 has been a dull year weather-wise, not the best for pumpkins. I tend to leave my pumpkin patch alone. The large leaves do a pretty good job of subduing weeds, but there's always a carpet of chickweed growing under them. There comes a time when it's impossible to weed without crushing pumpkin leaves and stems.

So last Wednesday I decided it was time to collect in this year's pumpkin harvest before they started rotting in the decidedly damp weather we've been having. Although a few fruits were still forming, most had had long enough to swell, ripen and for the skins to toughen. It's crucial to get them in before the first frost too, as this destroys them.

When harvesting pumpkins and squashes, it's best to collect them with a good portion of stalk, for if they do begin to rot during the winter, this is where the rot invariably begins.

The only ones which I don;t harvest yet are the butternut squashes which, by this time of year, have pretty much taken over half the polytunnel. These squashes earn their space in the tunnel every year as they produce plenty of large, firm fruits for me. I pick them as they are ready and actually started harvesting some lovely specimens a few weeks ago.

Now, last Wednesday wasn't the ideal day to be picking the pumpkins. A couple of days of rain had left the clay soil a little sticky, to say the least. I tried to avoid treading it down too much, though most of it appeared to be stuck to my wellies!

Boris was a great help too, as you can imagine. A bit like me, he absolutely loves getting dirty.

The end result was a very full barrowload of squashes and pumpkins, plenty enough to get Sue and I through the winter with probably a few spare for the sheep. The seeds won't go to waste either. We'll scoop out a few to roast and the rest are supposedly very good at helping to worm the animals. The chickens love them.

Even the abundance of leaves and stalks won't go to waste. They have gone straight onto the compost heap, which is now groaning under the pressure, and will go back into the soil next year to add goodness and body.

A giant heap of leaves. It won't be long before it's sunk down though.

Say cheeeeeeeese!

I've been a bit quiet on the blogging front of late. It's that time of year when things quieten down, with most effort going into harvesting anything which needs to come out before it rots or gets caught by frost. It's also the time of year when we thin down the animals for the winter. Some of the sheep will be going off on a little journey soon, now that they have fattened up nicely on the summer grass.

I should be putting up a few more posts for the next couple of weeks as I am rather incapacitated. I have a touch of man flu, but that is not the reason. More seriously, an occasionally sensitive tooth has just decided to become a total nightmare.

It began when I was on the Outer Hebrides last week and, despite my hopes that it would settle down, has become steadily more painful. I finally managed to secure a dentist appointment (something which fills me with dread - I have fainted several times in the past!) and my very nice dentist succeeded in locating the problem by sharply tapping my tooth until the pain shot up my left jaw  as far as my temple. She booked me in to have the nerve removed and advised me to ask the receptionist for a cancellation 'today or tomorrow'. But my relief was short-lived when the receptionist frostily informed me that the first available appointment would be in 12 days time and that was the best she could do. So I now have to take painkillers constantly for the next 12 days, for when my tooth decides to hurt it is not half-hearted about it. This happens pretty much every time I drink and if I breathe cold air outside. Coffee is out of the queston, so I shall be even more grumpy in the mornings!
Anyway, moan over, but I will be spending much more time than usual indoors for a while now.

And so to the cheesemaking. We've had a go before, round at a friend's who keeps goats, but we didn't have much success. We've since discovered that we should have used a starter culture because the goats milk we used had been frozen.

Mick and Carole from the Cambridgeshire Self-Sufficiency Group had offered to run a cheesemaking course, even though it was several years since they'd really done much in the way of cheesemaking. Now the folks at the CSSG are the most honest, helpful and friendly bunch of people you could hope to come across. They have years and years of smallholding experience. It's a shame that they are that bit too far away for Sue and I to really get very involved in the group.
The group are totally laid back, which is nice. But it does sometimes mean that things are not as well organised as they could be!
This applied to the cheesemaking. I'm not complaining at all as it was offered for free and the company was excellent. Unfortunately though, despite Mick's best efforts, the milk steadfastly refused to separate into curds and whey.

Here's what should happen: (Although if you really want to go ahead and make some cheese, you would do better to buy a book or seach the internet for more detailed information)

Goat's milk or raw cows milk (not easy to get hold of, but contact these people who visit farmers markets) are best to use.

If you are using pasteurised milk (or milk which has been frozen, as we learned) you need to add a starter. You can make your own, but to start with it is easily purchased.

You heat the milk up to 32 C, stirring to make sure the heat is evenly distributed. You then add the rennet (4 drops to 5 litres of milk). You then wait for the milk to separate into curds and whey. This can take quite some time, as we discovered!!!

Mick heating the milk ready to add the rennet.
Everything was still going well at this stage!!!

And so an early lunch was taken - a bring and share meal of breads, cheeses, cakes, scones, dates...you name it.

Mick and Carole demsonstrating how you would use a cheese press....
if you had some curds.

After lunch and it was on to Plan B, as the milk was showing no signs of forming curds. The low temperature in the room was probably not helping. Some recipes use lemon juice or white malt vinegar to precipitate the separation of the milk into curds and whey, so in a final act of desperation we tried this... then waited some more. Mick was rapidly running out of anecdotes to keep us entertained!

Well, to cut a long story shortish, we eventually got some curds, which were strained through muslin.

Curds and whey - at last!

And that was about as far as our cheesemaking got. While we had been waiting for the curds to form, Mick and Carole had taken us through all the theory of how to transform this into soft cheese, semi-soft cheese and hard cheese. We just never got to that stage!

At the end of the day we came away not having learned an awful lot, but thoroughly inspired to have a go at cheesemaking ourselves.
All we need to do now is to get some goats and a dairy cow. Not really. That is a big commitment. I would not be able to shoot off to chase rare birds at a moments notice and any significant time away from the smallholding would be nigh on impossible. Also, we would end up with gallons of milk and it's not so easy to sell as eggs.
For the moment we will source goat's milk from our goatkeeper friends or we will experiment with using pasteurised cows milk.

And if you wanted to know about that trip to the Outer Hebrides, it was to see a Wilson's Warbler which had come all the way across The Atlantic. The first Wilson's Warbler in Britain was a one day bird in Cornwall all of 30 years ago, to the day. I wasn't twitching then and wouldn't have got there in time anyway. The second was just two years ago, in South-West Ireland. I missed it by one day and it started a string of failed trips to that part of the world.
So this was only the third and an opportunity to get back a bird which I thought I would probably never see. News broke early last week and I was on the road that evening.

By the morning I was in a different car with three other birders in the queue at Ullapool ferry terminal and by early afternoon we were hurtling across the Isle of Lewis toward our target. We didn't even stop for an extremely close Golden Eagle which was quartering the moorland very close to the road.
The warbler was still present, but was proving extremely elusive. But just as we arrived it was spotted shooting across from one patch of cover into another, even denser. Dan and Mick were quick enough to secure a fleeting glimpse. Al and I weren't. And that was to be the pattern of the afternoon. Wherever those two went, the bird popped up. Whenever I decided to stay put and wait, the bird showed in a different part of the garden. When my nerve cracked and I moved, so did the bird.

It was well over two hours before I finally got the bird in my binoculars. My 505th species in Britain. Prior to that I had suffered fleeting glimpses with the naked eye. To be honest, it could have been someone chucking a lemon across in front of me!
Eventually the bird showed better, in the top of an apple tree. As dusk approached we headed off to Stornoway to seek out food and accommodation, for there was no option of a same day return on the ferry.

The successful team.
The sign on the wall says it all!

Early next morning we were back on the ferry and by the afternoon we were speeding back through England. Late evening I rolled back onto the farm... with toothache!

It's official. Guinea fowl are the most useless parents in the whole world.

A couple of years ago I was defending them against this accusation as our pair hatched 18 young and eventually successfully raised 12. But it's been all downhill since then.
Granted, they sit very well and do a great job of going unnoticed. It often takes me several days to locate their nests when I notice they are no longer sitting on the fence at night. And when it comes to near hatching time, the males defend the nest with gusto.

But they have shown an alarming ability to come off the nest at precisely the wrong time. Last year keets hatched from three of the four nests, but the mums would come off the nest as soon as a few hatched on the first morning. The result was very few young birds indeed.
But more shocking is the parents strict application of Spartan rules i.e. if you can't keep up, then tough. Now, being subtropical in nature, baby guinea fowl are not best suited to Britain's autumnal weather. In particular, long wet grass is deadly to them, for they quickly lose body temperature, become bedraggles and fall off the back of the pack.

One stormy couple of days last year did for most of the keets and we only ended up raising two, both of which had to come inside for part of their early lives.
I'm not too worried about this, but it is a shame and even I feel a tinge of sadness when I find a tiny ball of feathers lying motionless in the grass.

2015 has been decidedly untropical and as a result the guinea fowl were incredibly late laying and sitting. In the end there was one double nest, containing over 50 eggs, in the comfrey bed, a nest containing over 20 eggs in the raspberry patch and, belatedly, a nest containing just 12 eggs in amongst the rugosa roses.

The first two of these were inexplicably abandoned just days before hatching, but the final nest was still being sat upon right up until Sunday morning, when two keets appeared! One was doing a great job keeping up with mum, who was off the nest, but the other was on its side in the grass. I decided to let nature takes its course, but several hours later Sue appeared nestling a tiny bundle of feathers down her top! I suspected this might happen. Let me tell you that baby birds can be surprisingly noisy and, when they have grown a little, just a little whiffy too. Sue's plan was, however, just to get this little keet through its first few days and then to try and put it back with mum. This has worked for us in the past.


Roll on to yesterday morning. The sun was shining, though the easterly wind had a tinge of cool in it. The ivy, such an important late source of pollen, was smothered in buzzing honey bees and there were even a couple of pristine red admirals feeding on it.

Despite this burst of sunshine, the two new keets which I found were abandoned near the nest with mum back sitting. They clearly were not warm enough or strong enough to cover the short distance back to mum. This time it was I who buckled, so we now have three keets in a broody box in the dining room. The fourth bird is nowhere to be seen.

Next year I'm going to be ruthless. If we want more guinea fowl then I shall entrust the eggs to the care of a broody hen and they can be raised in the safety of a run.

Mangel Wurzel and Pumpkin Silverware

While I was away in Shetland I entrusted Sue with the onerous task of choosing the heaviest mangel wurzel to take along to the Fenland Smallholders Club meeting.
Mangel Wurzels are a kind of beet crop which I wrote about in a previous blog here.
In the past the Fenland Goatkeepers and Smallholders Club (as it used to be known) used to have an annual competition, the prize being the Jeff Yates trophy. By the time I joined the smallholders, this annual bit of fun was dying out. Nobody was growing mangels any more and the committee were even considering ending the competition.
But it was still running, just, and I won it in two consecutive years. I faced competition from just one other mangel wurzel in that two years!

Hollow Victory

When I founded the Veg Group it seemed like an ideal time to resurrect interest in this light-hearted annual competition, so I purchased seed for everyone and threw down the gauntlet.
I have to say that I was highly disorganised and didn't get my mangels sown until way too late in the year, with the result that by competition time they were puny!
Steve walked off with 'my' trophy and the veg group never heard the last of it all year.

This year I got serious. I sowed my usual patch of mangel wurzels to be used as animal fodder, but I reserved a patch in the main veg plot for some lovingly nurtured baby mangels raised in modules.
This gave me just the headstart I needed and when I left for Shetland many of the mangels looked like they had a chance of scooping the trophy. But the opposition were being cagey, with tales of monster mangels meant to scare the opposition away, or tales of abject failure to lull into a false sense of security.

So, on the evening of the competition, I  phoned Sue to find out whether I had reclaimed my trophy.
It turns out that competition had been much stiffer than in previous years, with six entries and four weighing in at over 15lb.
Of these, two had been 15lb something, one had been 17lb something and the winner was just short of 20lb....

AND IT WAS MINE!!!!

VICTORY WAS ALL MINE!!!!!

But that's not the end of my story. For the Veg Group have had a private competition going throughout the year to grow the heaviest pumpkin. Everybody was given several seeds at the beginning of the year, but germination was poor. Some even claimed that theirs grew into other vegetables (and so marrowgate was born).

Just one of my seedlings came through and I nurtured it in the polytunnel until it was time to go out into the big wide world. I was worried, as one of my competitors had posted pictures of his with developing fruits when mine was at the two-leaf stage! But had he gone too early? Only time would tell.
I chose a rather special spot for my pumpkin, on top of the manure pile where it could get all the goodness a pumpkin could wish for. First grew the leaves, giant leaves trailing all over the heap, and then came the first fruits. I couldn't decide whether to let several fruits develop or just to go for the one. In the end the plant decided. As one pumpkin grew and grew and grew the rest of the fruits gave up the ghost and all the plant's energies went into the one fruit.

And so this last Sunday I finally severed the stem and lifted the pumpkin. I had joked with the others about needing a forklift, a new trailer and a reinforced suspension, but disappointingly the pumpkin felt rather light for its size, as if it had filled with air inside.

When I reached the veg group gathering, everybody was being very secretive. Pumpkins were left hidden in cars and Steve (yes, the one who wrestled the mangel trophy from me for a short period) had even left his growing in the garden right up until the final seconds of the weigh in.

The weigh in was tense. 500g (a joke one, a button squash actually), 5.8kg, 6.1kg, 9.98kg. No-one had yet broken the 10kg mark, but the three biggest pumpkins were still left on the table. 10.5 kg.
It was down to two. 11.9kg. The mark had been set.
I heaved my pumpkin up. It certainly looked the biggest, but was it all hot air?
But then the scales told the story. Over 21kg!!

A clear winner. More silverware and all round bragging rights for a whole year!!!!!

I'm now looking up how to grow LONG CARROTS in preparation for next year's competition. I'll be ordering my mangel seed soon too.
Hopefully I'll find time to keep the smallholding going in between polishing all the silverware.

Bringing Home The Bacon

I've been away for a while on my annual sojourn to Shetland to hunt rare birds.  It's a bit different to The Fens up there, though the islands are windswept, full of smallholdings and there are Shetland sheep everywhere... so maybe not so different after all!

But just before I flew north, I sent a pig off to piggy heaven. If you follow this blog, you may be confused as I've not actually had any pigs on the smallholding this year.

Sue and I have found that one pig is quite enough to feed us for a year. However, pigs are intelligent, social animals and are best kept with at least one other of their own kind. So this year we were part of a pig co-op. A fellow smallholder raised three pigs, one of which was destined for our freezer. We only ever met our saddleback twice, once when it was just a nipper and then, a couple of weeks ago, to load it into our trailer and take it off to the abattoir.

We are fortunate to live just a few miles from a small abattoir who always give us an excellent service. But finding a butcher to process the carcass for us has been proving tricky. Both this abattoir and another nearby have butchers attached, but they both put your sausage meat into a big batch along with that from all the other pigs they are processing. The result is that, as far as the sausages are concerned, you might as well just buy some good quality sausages from the supermarket.

We did have an excellent arrangement with a very small butchers just a very short walk from Sue's school. They would pick up the carcass direct from the abattoir and cut it according to our wishes. They made an excellent sausage using just our pork. It was sometimes a job to persuade them to produce any more sausages for us than the standard amount produced from all the offcuts, but overall it was a very good arrangement.
However, the butcher who used to do the cutting for us has been poorly for a while and has now left. So the job has fallen to the one who makes the sausages. Unfortunately he clearly does not want to take on this job - our lambs last year came back not even labelled! His default answer to any request seemed to be "no".
And so we came up with a different plan for this year's pig. A real character we know who lives down in the central fens is also a butcher. In fact, it's the same person who transformed Daisy into sausages last year.

The third time I met my pig!

The downside is that it's quite a journey and I have to transport the carcass to him in the back of the car. The upside is that I get to help out and I really enjoy his company.
So just before I left for Shetland I took our pig along to him. It took only a couple of hours to turn half of it into chops and joints, as well as a box full of tasty sausages and a long string of boiling sausages.
The sausages are so tasty that we will not be selling any this year!
The other half of the pig was prepared for bacon and placed in a brine bath. When we started keeping pigs, we dreamed of sausages, ham, bacon and gammon. But there is an art to making these products and so far we have never really been happy with our own attempts, especially at bacon. Paul still uses traditional methods to make bacon and gammon.
It's not really a complicated process, but a skilled curer's experience can make all the difference, judging things just right between under and over curing. Paul has come up with a great way to achieve this on a small scale. After cutting half the pig into about four great lumps, these went into a cooling box which was filled with a brine mix, containing salt, a very little saltpetre, herbs, spices and sugar. A few milk cartons of frozen water help to keep the temperature down and weigh down the meat to keep it submerged.

And so I headed off to Shetland, half a pig in the freezer and half left at Paul's to cure. There is no waste either. The bones go to Boris or will be boiled up for stock, along with the skin. The flare fat from inside the carcass will be used to produce more of that wonderful leaf lard which makes such excellent pastry and lardy cake.

Sue will hate me for publishing this photo,
but the main subject is the smoked bacon

Fast forward two weeks and today we went back to Paul's to pick up the bacon. It had come out of the brine and been smoked in Paul's home-made smoker, made from a hollowed out upside-down fridge.
He showed us how to use his slicer and we set to work slicing while Paul cut up the large leg ham into more manageable gammon joints for us.
Fast forward another few hours and we've just enjoyed our first taste of the bacon, along with a few of the sausages, a couple of our own eggs and some fried mushrooms. All I can say is that we most definitely won;t be selling any of the bacon either!

A Pear Treat

Last year we got our first ever pear harvest. I have several varieties, but star of the show was the Concorde, an established cross between Comice and Conference. One young tree kept us supplied with delicious pears for a couple of weeks.
So over the winter in our forays to the plant auctions I purchased a further four Concorde pear trees. Well, you can guess what's happened this year. Not a single pear, not even from the more established tree! Some fruits seem to work like this, plums especially, one year a bumper crop and the next year nothing.
But the Beth and the Williams in the chicken enclosure have come to the fore instead. These pears are different in that they need to be picked before they are fully ripe. If you leave then on the tree they go grainy.
I picked most of the Beths a couple of weeks ago and they have now been eaten. Delicious they were too.
The ones growing on the lower branches fell victim to jumping chickens, who very much appreciate a pear to play with.

The Williams weren't quite ready, but when I cleaned out the chickens last weekend I noticed that three of them had committed suicide by falling off the tree straight into the chickens' water. So I picked out the rest, enough to fill a basket. It's not much, but it makes a welcome contribution to our diet and I anticipate ever increasing yields from all of our orchard trees.

Now, a week later, the Williams are ripe and very juicy. There are 9 trays drying in the dehydrator and almost ready as I type. I tried a slice and the flavour just kept increasing in waves.

I expect next year we'll have no Williams or Beths but five trees full of Concorde pears. I won't be complaining.

One Lonely Sister - Disheartened by the Sweetcorn

I have written about the Three Sisters system of growing before.
For those who missed it, here's a quick resume.
Grow sweetcorn, squashes and climbing beans together. They all have different needs for light and nutrients and all help each other. It is a system used by Native American Indians.

Of course, it is very trendy, especially when you select Cherokee Trail of Tears beans to grow, for this makes it sound even more authentic. While Cherokees are, reportedly, a good bean to grow, so are many other French beans. I prefer Cobra, which sounds pretty authentic in a desert context, though it of course inhabits the other India!

But this system of companion growing is designed to use the same land year after year in a completely different climate and soil type to what we experience in Britain. I have tried it and it does not work for me. The beans never do well, or if you plant them too much earlier than the corn then the corn never makes it. So I have been sticking to Two Sisters growing. Small groups of corn with pumpkins and squashes rambling in between. It has worked well, except that in cooler years, or if the sweetcorn gets off to a slow start, the cobs are not ripe before the wheat field next door is harvested.

The result is disheartening to say the least. I'm not sure if it's the rats or the field mice (I suspect a bit of both, and maybe a bit of rabbit thrown in), but they devastate the crop before it is ripe enough to harvest. They even have the nerve to chew through the husk material to see if the corn is ripe. If not, they leave it till later, irrevocably damaged.

Looking on the bright side, at least we've enough sweetcorn in the freezer from last year that we won't run out. Even if we do, we've plenty more vegetables to choose from. That's the nature of growing your own. Every year some things go mad while others disappoint. Just look at my courgette failure this year for a good example.

On the other bright side, Rambo is enjoying the corn leaves and the stem and roots will go back into the soil and give it body.

And on the third bright side, the squashes seem to be coming good and nothing seems to eat them.

But next year the already depleted Two Sisters will be going down to One Lonely Sister. I am going to experiment with a new variety of sweetcorn, allegedly a supersweet, non-hybrid variety which ripens early. But to be on the safe side, I shall again be growing some in the polytunnel and the rest in my mixed vegetable beds outside, away from the field and in the more protected environs of the main veg plot.

News From Nowhere

I find the seasonal cycle reassuring. Like the sun coming up, there is a certain security knowing that winter will come again and spring will follow it. Each season holds its own wonders and challenges. Without them things would get monotonous. And as a smallholder, each time they come around I get another chance to try and improve on last year. Unfortunately I grow a year older too!

But this cycle doesn't make blogging easy! How do you write about your potato harvest for the fifth time in five years without getting repetitious? I find pulling potatoes from the ground just as amazing, every time I do it, but it's hard to get enthused about writing about it again. I guess I could always hope that no-one except me remembers the post from a year ago. For this reason, I don't always post about everything I do.

One thing which I do look forward to are the cider club days which Roger runs. The spring meeting fell through due to a last minute lack of apples, so it is now a full year since our last flow of apple juice. I don't see the group in between times, but I enjoy their company. They are a group of thinkers.

This last Saturday we gathered again under ominous skies.
The weather held for us, just, and as we chopped and scratted, pulverised, liquidised and pressed, it put me in mind of a book by William Morris, News From Nowhere, a utopian and nostalgic image of times gone by. (Alternative Title: An Epoch of Rest, Being Some Chapters From A Utopian Romance). It is one of the very, very few books to which I periodically return. In particular it reminded me of the community effort to gather in the hay. These days one man comes along with a massive combine harvester and creates a dust storm. Then, a couple of days later, someone else chugs up and down the field and the hay magically pops out the back in its shiny black plastic roll. It is called haylage these days. But in the past people came together. Undoubtedly it was hard work only made possible by a community effort, but it helped bond the community in a way which has now disappeared.

Anyway, back to the cider making. The beauty of the autumn cider day is that the apples are freshly picked. This year Roger had secured a new supply of mixed apples. Such a mix makes for the best juice and the best cider. He had also surprised us by procuring several boxes of mandarins.

These went straight into the shredder, peel and all and it wasn't long before the juice was flowing.

It tastes absolutely delicious as is, but we have put a good quantity away for when Sue gets time to turn it into wine. Now that's something we don't make every year.

The apple juice turned out equally delicious. We've now got three demijohns naturally fermenting. It won't be long before the bubbles start and the airlock valves start making mysterious noises in the kitchen. There's a demijohn unsealed too. This will turn itself into cider vinegar.

As for those changing seasons, we had the fire on last night. It was dark well before 8. And this morning I watched the swallows streaming across the fields. They are not 'our' swallows, for there are hundreds of them, occasionally accompanied by a handful of house martins. These have not yet chosen to adopt our farm as their summer home, so I see them only very rarely on such days when an exodus is in full swing.

I, on the other hand, will spend much of the winter snuggled up in front of my cosy fire with a glass of cider, or even mandarin wine.

And I'll be thinking of my friends. Thank you Roger.

Spuds

Charlottes and Kestrels laid out to dry.
Boris is helping.

Back in the spring I planted 24 each of 7 varieties of potato. As long as we don't have a disaster, I know that this is plenty enough to last Sue and I for a year and that the last maincrops will see us through until the first earlies come out of the polytunnel

They were:

Earlies
Red Duke of York - an early which is great for chips and roasting.
Arran Pilot - a bulk standard for nice new potatoes. Performs well and seems to stay in the ground well too.

Second Earlies
Charlotte - Another proven performer and so expensive in the shops!
Kestrel - A new variety for me.

Mains
Romano - a descendant of Desiree. I like a red potato and this gives great bakers.
King Edward - a good, honest basic maincrop spud.
Pink Fir Apple - Another 'luxury potato'. If only people knew how easy it is to grow and how nice it tastes. Allegedly prone to blight, as it is very late, but mine are more than ready now and last year, when blight struck early, I got a better crop from this than from many other varieties.

I have pretty much settled on these varieties now, after a few years of experimentation. There is a lot of talk of the blight-free varieties these days, especially with warmer, damper summers. However, the ones I tried tasted pretty insipid, so I won't be converting just yet. I have to admit, in a bad blight year they did come through better than the others. I've found though that if I'm ready for blight and take the tops off before it gets into the plants, that I get a good crop anyway, even when blight comes as early as it did last year.

We have been harvesting the earlies for a good while now, but there are still about half of them left in the ground. One of the Arran Pilots the other day was so big it did for a meal for two of us. It still tasted great though.

The tops have died down on the Second Earlies and I cut them off a couple of weeks ago, so with a dry day yesterday, even verging on sunny, I decided to dig them up. I like to cut off the haulms a couple of weeks before digging potatoes up if I aim to store them, as this gives the skins time to set in the ground. There is no point leaving them in for longer as this just makes them prone to slug damage and rotting in wet ground.

A reasonable crop of Charlottes.
Plenty for the two of us,
plus the geese enjoyed the smaller ones
 and any that didn't pass the quality test.

Digging potatoes is a magical job. You just sink the fork in and lift the soil to reveal clusters of swollen tubers. I dig thoroughly to make sure there are none left in the ground, as any 'volunteers' will grow next year and can harbour diseases through the winter. Some always slip through the net though!
I then leave the spuds on the surface of the soil for a good few hours if I can, before gathering them up and storing them in thick paper bags specially designed for potatoes. Any spudlets or damaged tubers get thrown to the geese who are very appreciative. The best spuds then go into a dark wardrobe in the garage. This keeps them in the dark so they don't turn green. It also keeps them not so warm that they try to sprout but above freezing, for if the frost gets to them in the winter they are ruined.

The potatoes I've dug so far this year are a good size, undoubtedly helped by summer's plentiful rain. The yield is not massive (a bit more sunshine and warmth might have helped) but there will be more than enough for our needs. The cost of a few extra tubers is minimal and once you're planting a few dozen, you might as well plant a few more. Better to have too many than not enough. Plus any extras don't go to waste. Potatoes are very popular with most of the animals.