The good, the bad and the puzzling - the year at the allotment

It's been a mixed year in the kitchen garden, with unpredictable successes and failures. Last year, it was easy to see that the long heatwave at the beginning of summer would be good for tomatoes, chillies and sweet peppers; this year has been much more unsettled.

There has still been plenty to celebrate. About six weeks ago, the bare earth container which holds the saffron crocus bulbs, started sending up little shoots, and for the last month I've been carefully tweazing out bright red stigmas to store as my first proper saffron crop.

Also coming good for the very first time is the fennel, a crop that has tended to bolt in previous years. I think the consistently wet autumn helped deliver steady moisture to the developing plants and produce some lovely crisp swollen stems.

Stalwarts that didn't disappoint included the globe artichokes: the plants, once established, produce multiple buds between May and July, then, after a rest in high summer, start sending up new buds again in September. We are just finishing them now.

Potatoes were terrific again this year: beautiful Lady Christls like unblemished hens' eggs in June, followed by delicious pink-skinned Rosevals and a long season for the maincrop Pink Fir Apples.

The weather was very slow to warm up in spring, which meant that chillies, peppers, tomatoes and aubergines couldn't go outside until much later than usual, and the seedlings stayed tiny until June/July. The sweet peppers, tomatoes and aubergines caught up quite quickly once they were finally planted out in the polytunnel and greenhouse (and the sweet peppers happily went outside); the chillies on the other hand, are still mostly green and I'm not sure the Carolina Reapers will ever fully develop.

The outdoor tomatoes fruited late but then they all fruited at once. We had about a month until the blight arrived at the start of October and then of course the plants were all gone over in the space of a few days. The greenhouse plants normally keep going until December, given mild enough weather outside, but having picked a load of little Black Cherries and the last few San Marzanos last week, I doubt we will get any more now.

Tree and soft fruit yields were similarly mixed. The red, pink and blackcurrants all fruited reliably but the whitecurrant bushes produced significantly fewer berries. I managed to net the cherry trees in good time (for once) and enjoyed a good cherry harvest. One day it would be nice to save some to make jam, or liqueur, but they are a bit too delicious to resist eating straightaway.

The quince tree, normally so prolific, only set four fruit this year. I think this may well be because we gave it its first proper pruning last winter. There was certainly plenty of blossom in late spring. And the pear trees nearby were so laden with fruit that I was giving away carrier bags full of fruit for a couple of  months in late summer. The perpetual spinach all bolted and I heard similar tales from other allotmenteers. The winter radishes, so plentiful in 2018, are this year still tiny and showing no signs of plumping up so far. We will just have to hunker down with the parsnips, beetroot, oca and yacon over the winter.

Sack the spuds

I have had a kind of epiphany. I experimented with a new way of growing potatoes this year and it was so successful that I am converted. From now on, I will be growing potatoes like this every single season.

Potatoes grow quite well for me but I have always felt a bit grudging about them. They take up so much space. They are labour-intensive: digging trenches for them; earthing them up, ideally several times; digging them out once ready. And unless you hunt down the unusual heritage varieties, they're a bit mundane. Yes, the first new potatoes, taken home and cooked as soon as possible after being dug out of the ground, taste fantastic, but by the time you're using up stored maincrops, there isn't much to choose between your homegrown and potatoes bought in the shops.

The tipping point for me came last summer when for the nth year in succession I found myself digging potato plants out of the previous year's bed. No matter how thoroughly I harvest the spuds, or how many times I dig the bed over, I never find them all, and the following season, up come the plants in the middle of the beetroot, or peas, or parsnips.

I've given talks in the past about growing potatoes in bin liners, mostly to people without a garden at all. Three chitted spuds in the bottom of a black-lined bag, covered with compost, will grow quite happily to give a small but healthy yield. The chances of them developing diseases or being attacked by pests is much reduced, so if you have problems with slugs, or eelworms, or conditions like scab, growing in a bin liner can give you a much greater chance of success. It's much less labour-intensive as well: chucking some multi-purpose compost over the plants to keep much of the stems covered is much less hard work than full-scale earthing up out in the field.

The drawback is that confined to a bin-bag, you don't get very many spuds in your harvest. So what would happen, I wondered, if you kept to the container principle, but used one that was much, much larger? Around a cubic metre in size, in fact.

Anyone who gardens regularly or who has an allotment will have a dumpy bag or two knocking around. Normally used to deliver manure, or aggregate or sand, the dumpy bag ends up in the shed, or quite often stuffed underneath it, occasionally being used to carry leaves or trimmings to the green waste bin. Would they be big enough to grow a decent crop of potatoes?

One standard dumpy bag filled with organic matter, topped with compost and straw. Nine
seed potatoes were planted six inches below the surface of the compost.

The short answer is yes, plenty big enough. The crop wasn't just decent but impressive. The potatoes themselves were unblemished, a good size (actually the Rosevals were on the small side, but the Lady Christls, Salad Blues and Pink Fir Apples were much the same size as their open ground equivalents) and full of flavour. Each dumpy bag took nine seed potatoes at the beginning of the season and we harvested around 9-10 spuds for each seed potato once mature. Any potatoes I have missed in the bags (and it's entirely possible) will come to light when the bags are emptied and the compost inside them used to mulch and enrich other vegetable beds.

Lifting Lady Christl plants to reveal the potatoes underneath.

There are three drawbacks - well, not quite 'drawbacks', more things to take into consideration when growing in the dumpy bag:

1. Filling the dumpy bag with the requisite 0.8 cubic metres of compost. What I did was to start filling by adding lots of shredded cardboard and paper to the bottom of a bag, lots of old coffee grounds, leaf mould, free Council 'soil improver', all the usual types of organic matter, until the bag was around two-thirds full. The top third was filled with a couple of bags of multi-purpose compost; perhaps a third bag if I'd misjudged the amount of 'ballast' at the bottom. The potato plants still needed earthing up: I used lots of grass cuttings, straight from the mower, spread all around and over the haulms.

The growing plants still needed earthing up, ie, covering the exposed haulms
with soil and grass cuttings to keep out the light and help the potatoes
grow under the surface.

2. The potatoes grown in the dumpy bags definitely needed more water than those in the open ground. The bags themselves are water-permeable so don;' need drainage holes drilling in them, but in any dry spell, they needed copious watering, not something I'm used to with potatoes.
3. A dumpy bag, even one with plants spilling over the top, sitting on your plot or terrace is not a particularly visually appealing way to go about growing potatoes. You could, if you cared enough about this, screen with fencing, or even put them behind a low hedge. At the allotment, I used pallets stacked vertically and lashed together to frame and stabilise the bags, which did nothing for the aesthetics but did keep the bags held upright with no slumping.

Spuds you like

For the last few years, I've been very conservative about growing potatoes. Having found an early new potato, Lady Christl (left), which for me matches a superb nutty flavour with beautiful unblemished creamy skin, I've stuck with that for harvesting from June to September, and have grown Pink Fir Apple as a maincrop for harvesting from September onwards. I've occasionally tried out some other earlies, such as Charlotte (nice but too similar to Lady Christl), and International Kidney, which I disliked at the time because the potatoes fell apart in the pan when I tried to boil them. I'm now not so sure that this is the fault of the potato and is more likely to be down to the growing conditions (too dry), so perhaps I should give the International Kidneys another go.

Having tried out a number of heritage potatoes in preparation for our Secret Garden Club Potato Masterclass, I've cleared some extra space on the plot in order to experimenting with growing some new varieties.

Cara
Recommended by a number of people as a great baking and chipping potato, it's also apparently fairly drought-resistant. I find I rarely have to water potatoes specifically, but if we do have a dry summer under the hosepipe ban, hopefully the Caras will come through unaffected.

Shetland Black
With skins of a deep midnight blue, the flesh is creamy-yellow with a dark blue vascular ring. Like Cara, above, these are best baked or chipped, or roasted.



Pink fir apple potatoes

Pink Fir Apple I'm sticking with Pink Fir Apple for this year at least, as it usually rewards me with a high yielding, long lasting crop. I can dig up beautiful Pink Fir Apples throughout the winter. It's great boiled or steamed in salads, but they're also good sauteed and I love baking them whole as well.

Salad Blue
"Are they dyed?" our Garden Club attendees wanted to know. These potatoes are puzzling as no-one expects potatoes to be a dark indigo colour all the way through the flesh - and yet they still taste like potato. They make a distinctive mash and great chips. Roasted, the colour loses a lot of its impact as the potatoes brown in the fat.

Mayan Gold
Mayan Gold is a variety developed comparatively recently from the Phureja potatoes of Peru, so you can say that this is a close approximation of the first potatoes brought back from the New World. They are a distinctive buttery-yellow colour, a shade I associate with potatoes served in the Mediterranean, as opposed to the creamy-white of many British varieties. The taste is very like a new potato, but the texture is more floury: they're good for mash, roasting, and beautiful, pillowy chips.



 Examples of heritage potatoes, clockwise from top: Highland Burgundy, Salad Blue, Mayan Gold, Golden Wonder and Pink Fir Apple

 I've managed to retain space for my beloved Lady Christls, but one heritage potato which I would have liked to have included for its looks failed the taste test: Highland Burgundy is a hugely attractive spud, with dark red skin and bright crimson flesh all the way through. Unfortunately, I found it bland in flavour and with an almost fudgy texture. It looks great mixed with 'normal' potato in a mash, but the flavour didn't stand out on its own.

Salad blue, Highland Burgundy, Mayan Gold potatoes supplied by Carroll's Heritage Potatoes - seed and eating potatoes both available. Lady Christls supplied by Marshalls Seeds. Pink Fir Apples supplied by Victoriana Nursery. Cara, Shetland Black potatoes supplied by Thompson & Morgan.

Happy new year

My first ‘proper’ trip to the allotment this year was heartening. A four-inch blanket of snow insulated most crops and while the outer leaves of Swiss chard and spinach are unappealingly brown and slimy, there is encouraging new growth coming through in the middle – thankfully as these two usually keep us going through the ‘hungry’ weeks in February and March. The chicory and radicchio look pretty horrible as well, but when I peel back the mushy, frostbitten layers there are healthy pink hearts underneath. I’m thinking they could go into a tart with some of the leeks and some blue cheese.

The greatest number of casualties is in the brassica bed. Many of the purple sprouting broccoli plants have been flattened by the weight of snow on the net covering them – although thankfully, I don’t think any of the main stems have snapped as they did last year – and the mature Savoys are browned and soft. The calabrese looks dead as well: no sign of any recovering growth here.

I dug up parsnips and the very last of the pink fir apple potatoes. The parsnips taste wonderful after the prolonged freeze: sweet abd fragrant instead of that soapy flavour they have early in the season. The potatoes are remarkably unharmed: there’s a bit more slug damage than there was back in November and just as I was thinking that the potatoes were generally smaller this year than last, I found some utter whoppers under the last haulm right at the end of the row. I love these baked whole, or roasted, especially if I can mix them with some of the parsnips and Jerusalem artichokes, since a cold, wet January is hardly the time for potato salad.