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?
Bit short on available space so have been doing potatoes in grow bags and towers. Knocked over and emptied out a grow bag last week (easy way to harvest) and was very pleased with about a kilo or two or potatoes. Plants suffered mid-season from those potato eating ladybugs so didn’t know what the crop would be like. Roasted with a little salt, olive oil and homegrown garlic and they are delicious. Can’t wait to get into the other growbag and towers!
Hi John. I have been meaning to make a tower. It would be interesting to see if it is successful
Gav
We picked our onions a few weeks back and our spuds are doing well. They are not ready to pick yet…Hope I get as much as you did Gavin, that is quite a haul 🙂
Best of luck Tania. May your spuds be plentiful!
Gav x
Impressive haul indeed!
Very nice!!
I had two large garbage pails that we have as surplus when they went to a different container for garbage pickup, so I used those to grow potatoes for awhile. I got about 7 kilos from them, total. Not as much as I would have liked, but enough for more that a few meals. Next year I am trying for a real veggie patch.
Barb
Still a good haul Barb. It beats my effort last year!
We grew potatoes for the first time in many years this past summer, and think we got about 55-60kg. We did have some trouble with wire worm, but overall we were very pleased. Onions – planted not nearly enough, and one bed just shrivelled up during the drought – I had forgotten to water it while they were young, for which I paid dearly, as the crop was about 10 kg. Since I probably cook an onion daily, that is what might be called a disaster. Lesson learned.
Dawn that is an impressive spud crop. Sorry about your onions. About 25% of my onions failed as well due to black aphids
Better luck next time x
Hi Gavin. I am green with envy. I don’t plant onions up here in Brisbane as I think I’m asking for failure with our climate. However I did plant potatoes in three potato bags earlier this year and harvested them a few weeks ago. The potatoes were all rather small but maybe I didn’t water them enough. You must be thrilled to have such a good harvest of these veggies that provide the backbone of so many dinners.
Very pleased Jean. So spring onions grow up there?
My onions were planted much later int he season for a later harvest but most of the sets haven’t grown anyway – no-dig beds aren’t great for rot crops in the first year. Out of the 200 or more sets I planted, I have maybe 20 growing. 🙁 Better than nothing though. My spuds, if the prolific leaves are anything to go by, will be producing a bumper crop. I planted them in apple crates purchased from Bacchus Marsh and planted them mid October as we get frosts much later in the season in Ballan so I won’t yet be harvesting those either. They received their 3rd and final mounding up or burying yesterday so they’re free to do their thing now. I’ll probably try and harvest some early for Christmas though (the bottom board on the crates have been removed and replaced with screws rather than nails so we can empty them from the bottom instead of digging them out. We planted an all round variety (baking, mashing, steaming, etc) and sapphire potatoes which are vivid purple, even when cooked.
Those apple crates are massive. Good idea re the bottom few boards. I will keep checking your blog to see how your harvest goes. X
i am still impatiently waiting for my potatoes to be ready… most are flowering (i had some problems with wilt and had to pull a bunch of plants up which was disappointing)… there’s always much anticipation of what will finally be revealed after all that time in the ground!! i have heaps of different types so the waiting game is getting harder every day!!
Very nice! I have potatoes in the garden but they’re barely up and I’ve only started hilling them up with mulch so they’re a long way away yet. And my pink fir apples haven’t even sprouted! [sad face] I was so looking forward to those…
Hopefully a bumper crop in the waiting. Make sure they get lots of water. More water, bigger the spuds. X