From. Our. Own. Patch.

We are so excited!

We have harvested the very first potatoes that we grew our very own selves!!

They are a variety called pink fir apples, and are best when boiled or steamed. Yummy, knobbly, slightly pink, and best of all: the kids ate loads and asked for more!

We are grateful to have a harvest at all. At first, it seemed that our spuds were not going to work out. We tried growing them in tyres, starting out with one soil-filled tyre, and adding more tyres full of soil/mulch as the plants grew, as suggested in various permaculture/organic gardening books we know and love...but they didn't work so well. The potato plants died off before they could flower, and seemed to rot, stem and all. I did some web research to see if we were having our very own Irish Potato Famine, but no, something went inexplicably wrong with our spuds.

So, we decided to just dismantle the tyre towers and grub through to see whether there was anything in there. And lo! We found some spuds! There wasn't the bumper crop that the tyre-growing potato contingent had spruiked, but there was a modest bucketful. Enough to get us and the kids excited, anyway.