New Potatoes

Yummi – new potatoes are always the best. Last weekend we had our first potatoes. They finished flowering just a couple of days earlier, so it seemed okay to take a look at the potatoes. The plants were about 50 cm (20 inch) but the potatoes were still small. We needed to dig up three plants to get enough for a meal for two, so we’re giving them some more weeks.

These are asparagus potatoes and they turn out best if they are peeled after they have been coocked.The mother potatoes were left to sprout for weeks, until the sprouts were about 1 cm (½ inch) long. If they grow longer they are more fragile and they easily break when put into the ground. When the first green shoots surfaced the soil was hoed in order to cover the stalks. I hoed twice in the 1.2 m (50 inch) wide beds with two rows of potatoes, so the two rows met in a V-shape in the bottom. We had a long period with no rain at all so I watered the rows each night. That’s a lot of water and work, but it’s worth it, especially when you have a dedicated cat chasing the water. I really don’t know what went wrong with that cat. It’s usually the opposite reaction