Kitchen Garden Forum

I am growing maincrop potatoes in old galvanised dustbins (Cara and Romano). The haulms have died back and I have taken them off.
I was leaving the tubers in the bin to harden off for a couple of weeks but with the weather becoming extremely wet and likely to stay so, is there a danger that they might rot if the compost gets too wet?
Would I be better off harvesting them and drying on trays in the greenhouse

MikA

They only need a few hours in the open air.
Leave them in your greenhouse for any length of time and they'll go green and incidentally poisonous.
Harvest, allows some hours in the (dry) open air or ventilated greenhouse before storing undamaged spuds in a paper sack is a dark frost free but cool location.

I don't think they would rot, Mike. That would take a few weeks. One of the classes in our Village Show was a potato grown in a 9" pot so in order to get a huge crop, I planted it early in the year in the greenhouse. By mid-July, the foliage had died back and I cut it off completely, so since then the potatoes have just been in the pot, unharvested. When it was emptied last Saturday, the crop was perfectly ok!

Thanks folks, I think with the current weather they will have to stay in the bins for a bit longer, I hope the drainage holes are still working ok.

peter wrote:They only need a few hours in the open air.
Leave them in your greenhouse for any length of time and they'll go green and incidentally poisonous.
Harvest, allows some hours in the (dry) open air or ventilated greenhouse before storing undamaged spuds in a paper sack is a dark frost free but cool location.

Love that !

I emptied the potatoes out of the bins yesterday as it seemed to be the best day for a bit. Dried them off ok.

Why are most of the Romano spuds a pale pink instead of red? It seems the deeper they were the paler.

Would they have turned redder if I had left them?