It's my favourite time of the gardening year. My garden is its most colourful, the evenings are long and light (even if they are now getting shorter) and best of all, the First Early Potatoes are starting to be ready.
If you have been following this blog, you will know that I am a self-confessed spud geek and love my taters, experimenting with several new cultivars every year as well as growing my tried and tested
Kestrel second earlies and the blight-buster main crop Sarpo Mira. After years of growing my own, it's still a thrill lifting the first root and tasting the first of the year's crop. When we lived further south, and at sea level, that was my birthday treat, but since moving 200 miles further north and six hundred feet up, I've had to do without home-grown new spuds on the big day. I probably need to trial growing them in containers in the greenhouse, or experiment with quick-growing cultivars -
Casablanca is supposed to mature in just sixty six days!
There's extra excitement this year, as we have a Potato Show at Reaseheath on Saturday, and after a visit from the Judge, the tension is mounting. Our challenge is to lift as much of our crop as we need to select four potatoes to show, and then to clean and prepare them for judging. The aim is to select spuds which are of uniform size and shape, of a shape typical of the cultivar (round, oval, kidney-shaped etc), of a good size, clean of any spec of dirt and yet with the skin undamaged. There are apparently a number of old gardeners' tricks to help with this, such as dabbing milk over the tubers the night before to give them a nice sheen, which doesn't count as cheating, though our judge claims to have a good nose for handcream or furniture polish employed to the same effect!
Harry lifting potatoes and Derek explaining what the judge is looking for.
As we drew lots for our taters, some people are in with a better chance than others. Our guest judge claims that in all his many years of showing and judging, he had never know
Rocket to pick up a first prize, for example, which is a shame as it's a tasty tater, if prone to slug attack. Luckily, I'm not growing
Rocket and
Foremost have a good record of success on the show bench, though I've probably hindered my chances by conducting experiments with my college crop, watering only half of each row, and spacing the tubers 20cm apart in one and 30cm apart in the other. Hardly a recipe for uniformity!
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| Vales Emerald looking good enough for the herbaceous border! |
With less than a week to go, some plants are flowering profusely, others look far from mature, and only a few of us have done a trial lift to see what lies beneath. I tested one root of 20cm, unwatered - theoretically the least cared-for - and got a good helping of lovely clean, smooth tubers, if rather small for the show bench, but with a week to go, I think it's looking good!
They certainly tasted good!
