Potato Planting at the Allotment
Another fine day made even better by the easing of restrictions on numbers meeting out of doors. For the first time in months, six of us have been able to get together on the Allotment. There has been no rain this past week and the ground is dry – time to get out the hosepipe and give all the fruit and vegetables a good watering.
This is the Edinburgh holiday weekend and the traditional time in April for planting main crop potatoes. These are the ones which are good for storage through the winter unlike the earlies which need to be eaten from the time of lifting.
Main crop potatoes chitted for planting
This year we are growing the old favourite with us, Pink Fir Apple, along with Arran Victory and two varieties new to us – Heidi Red and the very popular variety Maris Piper. We plant them in the time-honoured way of digging a trench a spade’s depth and forking in a layer of manure and leaf mould along the bottom, then covering and ridging up.
Planting main crop potatoes
The first row of carrots, Nantes, was sown in soil which had been riddled to remove any stones which can cause the carrots to fork. It was covered with enviromesh to keep out the carrot root fly whose grubs eat away at the roots and generally leave nothing worth eating. And the sweet peas were planted out to give us our usual splendid display over the summer.
Jobs for next week
- Sow a row of broad beans – Crimson flowered – carrots, beetroot, peas, turnips
- Feed the fruit with Fish Blood and Bone fertiliser
- Put a stouter cage over the blueberries
- Finish planting the potatoes
