Welcome back. I hope you are all well and happy about the fact some restrictions have been lifted this week. I have already met up with a few people and it was so relieving to speak to someone not via screens and to speak to someone who does not live with me. Don’t get me wrong I love my family but it does get very exhausting as I’m sure you all know!

Anyway, how are my potatoes doing?

They are doing fine. It has been a couple of weeks since my first potato blog. I left it a couple of weeks on purpose to let them grow and so I had more to write about.

Where I last left this series was when I had first planted them out. I’m not going to lie, I thought this was going to be quite boring as I thought the process would take forever. Turns out in a couple of days green shoots began poking through the 5cm deep soil.

With potatoes you do not let them grow like normal plants/vegetables. Every time you see green shoots poking showing you have to cover them with another layer of soil. You are encouraging downward growth if you leave them to grow. It is counter-intuitive. The new tubers are fighting for space and if they grow too near the surface they will become green in the sun (not good!). We have to keep an eye out for any that are jostled to the surface and I cover if necessary.

It has been amazing to see how quickly they grow to the surface. I check the bags and pots every day and most days end up covering the potatoes daily as well.

During the potato growing process we have used so many bags of compost. When you look at them it does not look as much compost as 3 full bags plus some soil from a fourth bag. I wonder whether the bottom of the Bags for Life will have rotted away when it all comes to and end.

It has been fun to watch and help the potatoes grow and interesting to see the different varieties grow at different speeds. One of the kinds I am growing is called ‘Setanta’ and they have been growing especially slow. This week they have shot up so fast and are now pretty much in sync with the others.

The ‘Highland Burgundy Red’ variety grew faster than the rest and now that the soil has reached the top of the pot we are leaving it to grow by itself now.

What happens is that you keep covering the potatoes shoots as they come through and once you have covered them right to the top of the pot, bag, welly or whatever they are being grown in, you then no longer need to continue layering on more compost.

Most of the potatoes now no longer need to be covered and now they are just being left to grow out fully.

My suspicion is that there will be more potatoes in the Bags For Life than in the pots. They seem to have a lot more space and because I placed more potatoes in them to begin with, there will hopefully be loads!

Don’t know many people my age growing potatoes and its so surprisingly exciting to see them growing up through the soil! They are growing so quickly and its so easy to look after them!

It is now the norm in the house to hear the words: ‘Just going to add more compost to the potatoes!’ or ‘I’m going to take some photos of the potatoes!’

There will most likely be one more blog to end this series. I planned it so I wrote about the beginning, middle and hopefully the end.

See you then!

Martha B