Potato Plague

You'll remember an earlier post when I was raving about my lovely potato plants and how big and green and lush looking they were? I was so excited. They had so much potatoey potential. Well, they got a bug. Blight, I think? To be honest, though, I'm not completely sure because it could actually just be that potatoes look like that when they are ready to be picked?



I don't know. I've never grown the damn things before! How are you meant to know? Anyway. They looked bloody awful so I thought, well, if they do have a bug, better to dig them out now in the hopes of salvaging some wee spuddies!

Here's the result:



Look how proud and happy I am with my wee pile o' tatties! It was all very exciting. That's just one wee bag too - there's still another diseased looking bag there plus the two bags of late cropping ones and the entire garden full of Red Duke of Yorks.

Post-Script: my excited face was a bit less excited half an hour or so later when I cooked them and discovered that the variety is pretty damn bland and not at all waxy (so decidedly inappropriate for the potato salad I was concocting. Sigh...). But still, bland and floury though they were, they were all mine and it was such fun diving through the dirt hunting for them. Here's hoping there are no more diseases and the rest of my crops are just as fruitful!

Where to start?

I'm at that stage where I've been away from the blog for so long that I could easily just let it slip away and become little more than a fuzzy, well-fed memory, but I really ought to soldier on. To what end, who knows, but there you go. I'm back, world of the web!

We are finally unpacked and connected to the internet in our new place and all in all, it's really working out. Neither of us could remember for the life of us, what the kitchen looked like before moving it, so it was a pleasant surprise to discover that its general cleanliness and airiness when we got here after an epic van trip (never have I undertaken something as terrifying as driving solo almost the length of England in vehicle that is almost the same length as the house. It was like driving a missile silo down the road. It wasn't so much that I had blind spots as that I had small sections where I could actually see! But anyway. I made it without any scrapes - either to me, the van, our possessions or any innocent bystanders, so that's all that matters).

The garden is great in that we have one! We have a proper backyard with shrubs and a fence and all those normal suburban things. Given the weather has been uncharacteristically bright, it's been such a joy to be able to sit in the sun reading and sipping quietly on a glass of sparkling mineral water. I'm no soil scientist (that job goes to someone else in my extended family) but it doesn't take a doctorate in geology to know that the quality of dirt (or rather, dry crust overlaying solid clay) is crap, but I'm hopeful that things will grow regardless. My new landlady left a housewarming (garden warming?) gift of 12 runner bean seedlings and a bean tripod thingy in the garden, so I now have 18 bean plants in the garden. Actually, when I planted them I had 18. I now have 17 and a half because of the voracious appetites of the local snail and slug brigade (I may come back to my battle against these bean-loving beasts another time). Incidentally, transporting my balcony garden of pots was one of the more difficult processes of shifting house - nothing died, but the lad gave me more than one dirty look after the 15th trip up and down the stairs carrying sacks of potato plants and/or pots of courgettes! Hehe.

My newly appointed garden now sports:
3 varieties of potato (3 bags plus every spare space in the actual garden. I must have planted 20 seed potatoes last week. If they all grow - and I have my doubts - there will be potatoes for one and all. Come and visit, won't you? We'll have potato salad!)
3 varieties of beans (and the dwarf french beans already have the tiniest cutest wee beans. I'm dying for them to hurry up and grow so that I can eat them! There might also be bean salad when the eventual 'glut' arrives!)
2 kinds of courgette
1 tomato
Beetroot
copious quantities of herbage
salad plants scattered wildly around the garden in the hopes that the slugs might focus some attention on the easily replaced rocket leaves, instead of my precious beans!

I'm very excited about the garden, but this post is already too long, so I should sign off and come back to wax lyrical about the joy of adding one's own nasturtium flowers to a salad another day...

This week I've cooked:
- a truly lovely summer kedgeree which features hot smoked salmon, peas and sugar snap peas, served with a fried egg and crispy shallots on top. Not my own recipe (I'd change a few things) but one from Delicious. magazine if you want to try it yourself. I'd use ground cumin instead of whole if you track it down to try yourself (and I highly recommend it. Yum).
- homemade pesto and orzo salad with bocconcini, semi-dried tomatoes and rocket. Perfect for lunch when travelling - providing your office colleagues aren't afraid of a little garlic aroma. This recipe was from Good Food mag and will be a regular in my packed lunch repetoire I think.
- mini pavlovas served tonight at 10pm with local raspberries and strawberries. Blissfully summery and good.
- homemade ciabatta (actually I've only half made that - the dough is slowly rising in the fridge overnight).
- gingernuts and chocolate chip cookies
- fresh garlic bhajis
- oven baked paella (decorated with nasturtium flowers from the garden. Picture below although it actually looks a bit red overall in the photo. It was much prettier in person).



I have other stories about my first potatoes of the season but it's time to say goodnight. I hope your Friday nights were delicious and indulgent!

Offline

I have not been swallowed by some sort of web-based black hole, don't worry! Nor have I had my hands cut off, although my current situation does feel a bit like it. We shifted house last week, and my broadband won't be connected until next week [long suffering sigh]. I do have things to write about gardens and new kitchens and potato crops and the like, but alas I have to wait to post properly. But, I will be back soon, I promise.