Home grown potatoes and onions are easy to grow and harvest, and have more flavour than supermarket bought stuff. They are also much, much fresher as those bought can be up to a year old before you get them. They both need full sun and lot of water to help them grow big and fat.
Anyway, today was spud and onion harvest day at the house of TGOG. My fingernails will attest to all of the digging! I planted this lot back in August and you can see how I prepared the bed in this post titled “Potato Planting Time“.
The potatoes that I planted this year were Royal Blue. You can see that the plants have mostly died back, with the far end totally brown. All of the plants flowered, but no berries formed.
To my delight, I harvested a very large bucket (15L) of potatoes. The small white ones are from a Nicola that went to seed in my pantry, that I decided to bury about a month after I planted the main crop.
I am ecstatic. This is the biggest spud crop I have ever grown. Next year I will be planting in the front yard into the three garden beds that I am building over Autumn.
Then it was over to the main veggie patch, and to harvest the brown onions. These came out a lot easier than the spuds, as onions grow on the surface of the soil, not underneath. These onions will dry for a week in the greenhouse to let the stalks go grown and to form a protective skin around the bulb.
I have stored the potatoes in a wicker basket, so that they have airflow, at the bottom of the pantry which is nice and dark. At our normal rate of consumption, the spuds and onions should last until April.
Who else has potatoes in the ground? Have you harvested them yet?