Our home grown potatoes have been both a success story and a disaster this year

We started the potato year well with a wonderful crop of first and then second early potatoes, this success has led us to make a decision about what we will do about planting seed potato next year.

After we harvested the early potatoes we agreed that it would be a good idea to grow more of them next year as we really do think they add something special to a meal. We loved the way the Charlotte potatoes tasted and cooked up, we enjoyed the International Kidney potatoes that we also planted this year, this was our first year at giving this variety a try.

Now I have to admit it looks as if the main crops are turning into a total potato nightmare. This has hammered the final nail in the coffin of planting main crop potatoes for us, so next year it will be the earlies only for us. We have a limited amount of land to work our crop rotation plan on and had already been wondering what way to go with the future planting of potatoes. Hence we have now decided to grow and harvest and use our own potatoes when they are at a price premium in the shops which is spring and early summer. The flavours and varieties of  first early and second earlies also suit our tastes. So we are looking forward to next years planting and harvesting of our own early potatoes. This also means that in future we will not be struggling to store main crops in our over crowded shed.

If you are wondering what happened, where as our early potatoes coped well with our dry sandy soil and came out of the ground almost unblemished, this year for the first time our main crops are a chore to peel and prepare as so much of them is having to be cut out and thrown out. We are not composting this potato waste (we do compost  the healthy vegetable peelings) so all of this discarded potato waste is having to go into the weekly rubbish bin.  I will only throw away  what is unusable so preparing the potatoes for meal times has become a laboriousness process.

They say there is a first time for everything and this year I am disappointed with my main crop potatoes. As I said with space at a premium because of the need for crop rotation the choice for next year's planting has been made.