Potatoes

We love a really good roasted potato. Or maybe a steamed, freshly dug one, with lashings of butter.  This year we decided to have another bash at growing our own. It's fair to say we've not been all that successful at growing spuds in the past.  We get some but not enough to really justify all the hard work.  After seeing an article on Gardening Australia about growing potatoes using the layering method we thought, why not give that a go.  If nothing else, it will save an awful lot of digging.  And we had our lovely, homemade orange pots just waiting to be filled with something. 

Two varieties of seed potatoes duly purchased, we made up a mix of compost, soil and cow, chicken and sheep poo.  Following the method on Gardening Australia - well, loosely following it is probably more accurate - we put a layer of the mulch mixture in the bottom of each pot and then a layer of spuds followed by another layer of mulch mix.   And then we waited.  And waited.  And waited a little bit more until, at last, some lovely green leaves popped up through the layer of dirt.  So, we added another layer of the mulch mix.  And then we waited. And waited. And waited a little bit more until some green leaves popped up again.  We repeated this process until we reached almost to the top of the pots.   And then the real waiting started. Weeks and weeks and weeks of waiting.  Until last weekend when we decided to bust out the hand trowel and dig down into one of those pots to see what we could find.  And this is what we found:

Four and a half kilos of lovely spuds.  Not bad considering we only planted half a bag (or about 300 gms) of seed spuds (the other half went into Mum's garden).  Can't wait to see how the other pot went. 

Needless to say, we cleaned two up straight away and roasted them in the oven for dinner that night. I don't know if it's just because they were fresh, or because we were full of the glow of having grown them ourselves, but those were the best jacket spuds we've had in a long time.  Lovely crispy skin with really fluffy,light insides.  Yum. Barely needed any butter to make them just perfect. 

I've lost the label though, so I have no idea at all what variety of potatoes we planted.  Is there one called Delicious?????