Vegetables and Herbs

The early potatoes are now dying back and I harvested the first plant yesterday – they were a reasonable size but not as many as I would have hoped for, but they still made a meal for 4 people. They were cooked within an hour of digging and eaten within a minute of cooking!

 

Dig them up from the side with a fork and lift carefully to avoid spearing the crop. You can get special potato forks with flat tines but an ordinary fork will do the job. I just loosen the earth and dig them out with my hands.

With the early varieties I want to get them out of the ground to free up space for other crops; and if you leave them in too long the amount of slug damage and blight increases. Because the main crop develops more slowly, it is in the ground for longest and is most vulnerable to blight. When the haulm (leaves) starts to die it is good idea to cut it down a few days or a week before you harvest because blight spores on the haulm that get onto the tubers can cause them to rot in store.

The early potatoes are eaten immediately so they don’t need to be stored, but later varieties should be harvested on a dry sunny day and the potatoes should be left on the surface for a few hours to harden the skin. This will help them store better. If they are very muddy, rinse them in a bucket before hardening.

I try to get even tiny potatoes out so they won’t be growing and acting as a reservoir for pests and disease.

The best way to store potatoes is in hessian sacks or baskets; never store them in plastic bags. You can often pick up paper sacks from chip shops, or even use an old pillow case. It is important to exclude light or the potato will turn green but allow them to breathe and moisture to evaporate.

Before you store them, sort them out. Any damaged potatoes will need using first. This could be ones you've caught with the fork or damaged by a slug. If blight has struck check carefully that it hasn't started on any tubers. Discard these as the blight will spread throughout the bag of potatoes.

The ideal is to keep your potatoes at 5°C; for instance in a cool dark shed or garage.
It is said that potatoes which have turned green from being exposed to light, can be “cured” by storing in the dark but it is advisable not to store potatoes that are more than a third green.
Check your stored potatoes regularly for signs of rot.

This rather presupposes that you have grown enough to store! I am not sure we will have more than we can eat within a couple of days of harvesting, but you never know.

The herbs are also growing well so these need to be cut too and frozen for winter use. The mint is just chopped and stored in ice cube trays topped up with water. Other herbs such as rosemary and thyme are just frozen in freezer bags, but I will also add some to flavour wine vinegars. Herbs can also be dried in a very cool oven but I do think this method loses some flavour.

I still have some pea and bean plants which need to go out, so I will add some fertilizer to the empty patch and plant these tomorrow. Not a moment or a square inch to waste!