Kitchen Garden Forum

Normally I find potatoes which I missed when harvesting showing their foliage about now, usually where it isn't wanted. Usually I have allowed a few of these to mature to see if I got anything worthwhile before they interfered with the next crop. This wasn't worth the effort, I found; it didn't add significantly to my harvest of earlies [and they interfere too much with the enxt crop if used as extra maincrop.

However, this year I have decided to dig out the new growth wherever it appears and use the tubers, and while preparing the bean bed I managed to bring up a meal's worth of tasty tubers [Sante and International Kidney]. The tubers had somehow survived the cold weather [I had spread manure on the ground and covered it with cardboard] and were firm and mostly unblemished. I am sure I'll get 3 or 4 meals-worth out of my keepers.

That sounds like a good plan Mike. I find with a straw mulch quite a lot will survive winter

Last year we planted several acres of potatoes in (dare I say it) a field of peat and due to wet weather which had washed much of the ridges away leaving many green we had abandoned lifting them all. However from around late February we have been lifting the deeper buried ones for our own consumption and they have been excellent tasting potatoes.

Barney