New potatoes

[Odsox]

I forgot to mention it before but we had a couple of cooks of new potatoes this week.

I had been watching about half a dozen potato plants growing from volunteers, even though I dug EVERY potato up and missed none.
They were my first earlies that I dug in June and had made reasonable sized plants until Saturday night when we had our first frost.
I dug them up and was surprised that I got about a couple of pounds of reasonable sized new spuds, half of which we had for Sunday dinner and the other half last night.

That's one of the things I like about growing your own, especially out of season, cos I love that smug feeling when you wonder just how many other people in the whole world were eating freshly dug new potatoes in November ... even in the southern hemisphere.

[Green Aura]

Haven't seen my spud bags for a few days under several inches of snow-but they didn't seem to be doing anything before that so I'm guessing my Christmas new potatoes are off the menu!

[The Riff-Raff Element]

I'm impressed! Our crop of spuds this year was not great: I suspect the weather was just a little too dry around flowering time and I'll be improving irrigation for nest year. We should have enough to last us to Christmas, though.

[Christine]

I had hoped to chit and grow the pathetic remnants of some new potatoes that did really badly earlier in the year and have them for Xmas, so I left them in the greenhouse and waited... and waited. They never chitted, just went green and dry. So what should I have done...?

[Odsox]

Funny you should mention that, but ....
I saved some Charlotte to plant for Christmas and chitted them straight away, they too just went green with microscopic shoots in the eyes, but the eating ones in a wooden crate in our cool dark larder have inch long shoots on them (or they did before I rubbed them off)
I never got around to planting them but I'm sure they will burst into life when buried in moist soil, as I now plan an early crop in the polytunnel with them.

[Christine]

mmm - perhaps I'll try that (no polytunnel, but access to a greenhouse = that may well be a heap of glass after all this snow)