TOBY BUCKLAND
How to harvest a perfect summer crop of potatoes
IFELL in love with gardening while digging potatoes. I was eight and in my Uncle Bob’s garden, I’d helped him plant the seed tubers just weeks before.
My job then had been to push the sprouted potatoes among beads of bladder wrack and slimy belts of kelp that we’d gathered from the beach and then cover the lot with soil.
I hadn’t given the potatoes a second thought until later in the summer when I was back in my uncle’s garden, digging down among the abundant green tops and finding to my delight that the seaweed had vanished! In its place were golden nuggets of new potatoes, shining out like buried treasure.
Many seasons have passed since then, but even now, when I’m lifting spuds, I remember the thrill as the potatoes came to the surface.
The big difference is that now I take more care and instead of harpooning in from the top I work in from the sides of the rows so as not to spear the tubers.
I’ve learnt to leave early and secondearly spuds in the ground, lifting only what’s needed, as opposed to gathering them all up at once in a frenzy of digging, as their flavour is always better when cooked straight from the soil.
In years when I’ve wanted to plant a follow-on crop of sweetcorn or late runner beans and been stuck for space, I’ve lifted the lot, but rather than storing in bags in the shed I’ve reburied into buckets of leaf-mould and compost as the mulchy environment ensures the spuds stay moist.
Another trick I’ve learnt while lifting is to look for leafy tops of stems that still have embryonic potatoes attached to their roots. Buried back in the ground and watered well, they give a second crop of new potatoes just as the original rows are coming to an end.
Happy harvesting!