Harvest Monday - 15th June 2015

Latest post from MARKSVEGPLOT – a blog about food and gardening in England”

Potatoes are top of the harvest list this week. These ones are the first of the “Winston” variety, a First Early.

What you see there is the yield from one seed tuber, grown in a recycled chicken manure container. It’s just the right quantity for a 2-person serving. I know that if I left the potatoes a bit longer (maybe until the foliage died down) I could get a bigger yield, but I’m not after a bigger yield. I want quality rather than quantity.

Here they are, washed and ready for cooking, giving me an opportunity for an artistic photo as they sit in the evening sun on the kitchen windowsill…

At the same time as digging up these potatoes I harvested a bit of salad to go with them and (and a fabulous tomato quiche that Jane made).

Firstly, this “Marvel of Four Seasons” lettuce:

This is “Devin”:

And then there’s this batch of Baby Leaf Salad, including Cress, Mustard, Mizuna, Rocket and Pak Choi

In the photo above you can see more clearly the complete yield from the container of “Winston” potatoes – a few “tiddlers” of course, but also at least 10 tubers of a decent size, which means the yield from the original seed tuber was 10 : 1, which seems OK to me.

On Thursday I used all the surplus Lettuce seedlings to make a Baby Leaf salad. Certainly a better option than throwing them on the compost!

I already had several Lettuces potted-up and waiting their opportunity for planting, so I didn’t need all that lot. Snipping off the leaves with a pair of scissors produced this:

At the weekend I harvested another batch of “Winston” potatoes, shown here before and after washing:

You can see the benefit of growing potatoes in a medium rich in organic matter (in this case composted stable manure) – the skins are smooth and blemish-free, with not a sign of scab. Once the potatoes are harvested the compost from their containers is added to the raised beds as a soil-conditioner.

The Broad Beans are not ready yet, but it won’t be long now…

I am linking this post to Harvest Monday, hosted as ever by Daphne’s Dandelions.

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