Monday, 14 March 2011

Potatoes and currants

Beautiful morning and even though there had been a frost last night I decided that I was going to put my first earlies in today. They'll take a while to come through the soil and by then the frost hopefully wont be happening.

I read in one of my books to add newspaper into the trench to keep the plants moist. I had a bag of shredded documents which I though would do the job. Having spoken to one of my allotment neighbours she always adds slug pellets into the trench along with some fruit food. I had slug pellets and some growmore. I know neither are especially organic, but I lost most of last year's potato crop to slugs and there are a huge amount of the underground ones about so I thought best to give it a go.
Loaded up and ready to go

Chitted spuds (Arran pilot) shredded paper, slug pellets, growmore

Trench dug

paper, growmore, slug pellets - row one, forgot to water paper before adding potatoes

Potatoes  - did 2 rows like this, 2nd row got the paper watered before adding the potatoes

Row 1 - Earthed up


Rows 3 and 4 only added growmore and slug pellets as an experiment to see if the paper makes any difference at all.

Eek! Looks a bit like burial mounds!!

Again, a bit of an experiment to see what difference if any cloching has on the potatoes; not that I'm expecting the plastic ones to last long in the wind down there!! (But they were only £1 each from Poundland so they dont really owe me much!!)

Redcurrant and blackcurrants


Daft redcurrant already has berries on it!

They look so tiny now!

Am absolutely exhausted now, but feel like I'm making good progress :)

No comments:

Post a Comment