Thanks for your advice, Johnboy. In the case of the Sarpo Mira grown in buckets there are so few potatoes in there that we just eat a bucket load in one sitting. In November 2013 I shifted all the buckets into the greenhouse and emptied one at a time when we needed some spuds and the crop was so goo...

I registered on the forum some years ago when I was at work and used the office e-mail for alerts. Now I have one at home, how can I change my details on the forum so that I receive alerts, please? (By alerts I mean notification when someone replies to one of my messages).

Cheers!

Thanks Peter for another very helpful reply. We will tip the potatoes out, and eat 'em!

Brilliant reply, Peter. Thanks!

Call me a grumpy old old git (no, please don't) but I'm not quite sure what a "blog" is. A bit like Facebook or Twitter when someone posts "I'm on the train, just seen an awesome [something-or-other]..."? Erm, who cares? Is anyone interested? But one thing's for sure, it is reall...

Hedgerow Jelly: Last autumn I made hedgerow jelly from anything I could pick locally - elderberries, sloes, haws, rosehips, a few blackberries. Extracted the juices (I used a steamer but you could add water and boil it up in a preserving pan and push through a sieve) and added 1lb sugar to each pint...

Using excess French Beans I made a delicious relish. Basically: slice some beans and boil for 5 mins in salted water. Cook some onions in a bottle of vinegar until soft, add the beans chopped small, a little more vinegar, and 500g sugar or thereabouts, let it cook a bit longer. Taste and if not swee...

I did something similar last autumn - about this time of year, I guess (August) - when I set carrot seeds in a large tub. Good germination, but as the weather turned colder I lifted the tub into the greenhouse. Watered erratically, in other words forgot about it for some weeks, but persevered and pu...

Having cut the haulms off potatoes growing in a series of tubs and buckets, if I leave the spuds in there will they still fill out? Haulms had brown spots on leaves, but not blight (which I recognise from several years experience, hence grew a blight-resistant variety Sarpo Mira). Foliage had grown ...

Having had great results from Sarpo Mira in previous years, growing the tubers in tubs and without a hint of blight, I bought new seed potatoes this year and they are planted in a series of tubs. One batch came from Wilko, one online along with all the seeds we ordered this year, and at the garden c...

Blankets of greenfly on the sweet peas, black fly on the beans, snails ate all the peas, we see armies of slugs and snails across the path every evening, club root got the cauliflowers, a pigeon got under the netting and has pecked kale plants, slugs ate all the carrot tops in a tub, I find vine wee...

In an effort to avoid club root we buy resistant varieties, sow in plugs, pot on in small pots, grow them on in the greenhouse, then plant a good healthy plant in the soil having dug a big hole and filled with a mixture of our own and bought potting compost. The theory is that by the time the roots ...

Yes, early signs of leek moth on a couple of leeks but we had them covered with fleece until 4 weeks ago. I took it off because a fox decided to use the fleece as a trampoline and a toilet! The plants are absolutely pathetic, skinny things. And the onion tops have all been chomped but at least the o...

I know exactly what you mean, Bren. We planted a selection of over-wintering cabbage/sprouting broc/spring greens/caulis and they all looked pretty much the same. In fact what I thought was spring greens turns out to be a cauli, one of the best we have ever grown! Planted last October, covered in sn...

I have grown potatoes in pots this year and 6 of them look appalling. Something has eaten most of the leaves, leaving a few stems. Interestingly the other 20 tubs have been left untouched (oh dear, hope this isn't tempting fate) and what is more interesting is that the ones that got chomped were sho...