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Potato varieties 2012
23/02/2012 | 
Author This year I have another 200 potato tubers to surface plant on our second plot for this second year of gypsum treatment to try to rectify our clay soil problem. As I won’t plant spuds next year due to not wanting to risk trying the same crop on the same soil three years running I have chosen no less than 13 varieties to try out.
I will post reviews on each variety with my own photographs of the leaves and flowers and the tubers themselves both whole and halved. I will be reporting on the yeilds I got, along with when I planted and harvested them and the recommended cooking methods for each variety and of course how delicious they all were and also hope to post some of my favourite recipes with maybe some photographs of them cooked on the plate in the case of some of the more unusual coloured varieties.
So here are the varieties I’m planting this spring:
First Earlies
Casablanca – A new first early variety that produces attractive smooth white tubers and is slightly floury and good for all uses from boiling and chipping to mash and roasting.
Colleen – A waxy variety suitable for organic production producing short oval tubers with yellow sking and flesh that is good for chips, baking, boiling and for use in salads.
Red Duke of York – A vigorous floury heritage variety producing larger, oval, red skinned tubers with moist yellow flesh that is reported to be of superb flavour. These are said to make a lovely creamy mash with an attractive colour and when baked the red skins remain adding colour to the plate. They also roast well and look good if roasted in their skins too.
Sharpes Express – A waxy heritage variety said to have excellent ‘new potato’ flavour. Produces pear shaped tubers with bright white flesh and smooth skin. For boiling or steaming whole in skins and eating hot with butter or cold in salads and they also make great roast potatoes too.
Second Earlies
British Queen – A heritage variety producing dry floury tubers that are oval with white skin, snowy white flesh and shallow eyes. At its best when fried, baked or steamed. The high starch levels will cause them to break up if boiled in the ordinary way but if simmered gently it is said to produce the most wonderful fluffy mashed potato.
Dunbar Rover – Another heritage variety that is floury with a strong pleasant sweet flavour and a fine texture. Oval tubers with white skin, snowy white flesh and medium deep eyes. We are encouraged ”never judge a book by its cover” with this variety because it is not a perfect, shiny white looking modern potato, but the qualities for cooking and taste are excellent, and should definitely be tried and not under rated! These poatoes of the highest quality make great roasting, baking and mashed potato dishes.
Shetland Black – A very tasty and floury heritage variety producing small to medium size long oval tubers with a netted, very dark blue skin with shallow eyes. The flesh is yellowish with a markedly blue vascular ring which can be taken advantage of to produce some rather creative sauted potatoes or crisps. They are said to fry very well.
Witch Hill – An ultra floury heritage variety producing very presentable looking tubers with a smooth goldy-cream skin with brown freckles and near white flesh. Shape and size varies between rounded and kidney-shaped and bite-size to baker-size. These can be boiled, roasted or steamed and is said to make very nice roast potatoes with melt-in-your-mouth softness and smoothe lump-free mash with minimal mashing action but they need a bit of vigilance as they have a shorter cooking time than average.
Maincrop
Highland Burgundy Red – An early maincrop heritage variety that is mostly burgundy red inside with a definite ring of white flesh just under the skin and has a dull russet layer over a bright burgundy skin. The tubers are a long oval shape. They can be steamed, simmered, roasted, or sauted and make great novelty mash, crisps and chips. Nutritionalists claim that the antioxidants provide many health benefits including prevention of certain diseases.
King Edward – This traditional, national listed, late maincrop, heritage variety probably doesn’t need much describing. But scoring a 6 on the waxy/floury scale (one of the hightest scores) it makes great smooth creamy mash and light fluffy roast potatoes as well as working well for Potato Dauphinoise. White skin with very distinctive pink colouration and a creamy coloured flesh.
Lady Balfour - This floury, early maincrop variety was bred for organic production, hence its name. It produces oval tubers with splashes of pink with a firm moist creamy flesh and mild flavour and is good for boiling and mashing.
Salad Blue – This heritage, early maincrop variety is a floury potato and NOT for use in salads! It is very blue with the skin and flesh both a strong deep blue. The tubers are oval and the blue pigment is an anthocyanin providing many health benefits from the antioxidants it provides. It has a very high dry matter content and fries and mashed well and can again be used to create novelty blue mash, crisps and chips and are suitable for baking also.
Mr Little’s Yetholm Gypsy – This is a floury heritage variety with an interesting history. It is the only variety to sow red, white and blue colours in the skin and has cream coloured flesh and is suitable for baking, roasting, mash, boiling and for chips.
The start of the season 2012
Well I didn’t quite manage to keep up with my plans to add to the blog throughout last year so I’m going to try again this year. To be honest I didn’t quite manage to do anything like the amount of growing on our plots either. This year I am determined to keep this as a main priority in my life because the reasons I have for growing my own organic food are very important to me.
So here I am again with another 200 potatoes chitting away in the living room. I’m going to add more gypsum to the second plot in my 3 year long attempt to rectify our serious clay soil problem, and this year I am going to buy in some compost rather than break my back again with the rotted manure. More expensive and not as ‘organic’ but I want to make things as easy as possible this year so that I can manage to stick to my plan at getting all the raised beds in my five year rotation planted up. The harvesting, cooking and preserving of the crops will also be very time consuming so I’m going to try to make it as easy as possible for now and then hopefully in a couple of years I’ll be used to it and can start taking things further with seed saving etc.
So far this year all we have done is a bit of weeding and today I just treated my permanent asparagus bed with glyphosate in a bid to rid it of the couch and bindweed. I know this is not an ‘organic’ thing to do but it is the only way once the asparagus is established other than hand weeding on the surface which will not rid us of the weeds and will be a very hard and tiring continuous job.
This year I plan to post here at least twice a month and get some more work done on the static web site so that others interested in starting their own organic culinary garden can find all the relative information in an easy to navigate web site.
I am also taking over our communal garden this year. I have not really got permisson from the property owner but I am sure he won’t mind seeing as at the moment NOTHING is being grown at all out there. I intend to plant some rhubarb and wild garlic in a long bed that never gets any sunlight and also plant rosemary, lavender, bay, mint and chives in the sunnier beds and let all other nine occupants know that they can feel free to use the produce so long as they respect the garden and pull out any weeds they see when they pop down to harvest anything that they want to use.
Next year I may invest in some pots to put on the brick plinths in this victorian garden and grow some annual herbs too.
I was after sparrow grass, not couch grass!
Last year I collected some seaweed from a beach on the Isle of Sheppey and after cutting down the asparagus ferns, I cut up the seaweed and put it sraight onto the bed without washing it. My hope was that the seaweed would feed my asparagus crop and the salt in it would prevent the weeds from growing whilst not harming the crop.
Unfortunately that didn’t quite work:
Some nasty dandelions and towards the other end of the bed so much couch grass! I weeded it all before planting the asparagus but did end up doing one end a second time and dug deeper and it certainly shows, even 5 years on!
A pic taken low down to the bed from the other side is even more disheartening:
I added some extra salt to the bed yesterday and if that doesn’t harm the weeds I think I may try to paint some glyphosate directly onto the couch leaves so that it is not being watered into the soil and see if that has any effect. There are a lot of them to get round with a paint brush though!
If you ended up with unwashed seaweed on a bed of plants you wanted to keep you could guarantee they would all die! Oh well, we live and learn.
What we’ve managed so far (Pommes Dauphinoise?)
Leaves and manure brought in
We got about a ton of lovely well rotted manure in late last year and in addition to this I have been an extremely avid autumn leaf collector (the men from the council kindly bagging them up for me and leaving them for me in nice blue bags on the roadside!). I did get some odd looks from other ADI’s as I pulled up in my tuition vehicle and stuffed it full of council refuse!
200 Seed potatoes that are now in the “chitting” room!
On January 23rd we went to the London Potato Fair, now conveniently just down the road, and got 200 seed potatoes to grow on the plot that will later be our ‘Fruit, Herb and Flower Plot’. We ended up opting for:
40 Duke of York
First Earlies and waxy – Hope to enjoy the early harvest as salad potatoes and also roast them with saffron to compliment roast chicken and roast beef dinners.
50 King Edward
Main crop and very floury – Used to love them mashed as a child but not eaten them since going organic and now looking forward to trying them for Pommes Dauphinoise too.
40 Sarpo Mira
Have enjoyed these before and they really ARE blight resistant and we thought they tasted great too.
40 Isle of Jura
Though aimed at the commercial pre-packed market these are said to have a very good flavour and also have good resistance to blight, slugs and even eelworm!
10 Colleen
An Irish first early variety we have never tried before that is often grown organically so we decided to give it a trial.
10 Salad Blue
Finally decided to have a go at eating blue mash via this early main variety. The blue pigments are anthocyanins with strong anticarcinogen properties so it’s more than pure novelty.
10 Mr Little’s Yetholm Gypsy
The only known variety to show blue, red and white colouring in the skin and it has an interesting history so I thought we’d try it out.
Solent Wight garlic was sown last week
Finally got the garlic planted and hoping to keep back the best bulbs to plant next year. Garlic has to be just about the easiest crop to save your own seed from of them all! Well, that is what I am hoping anyway. Aiming for very little expense each year to grow all the crops we want.
Check out The Garlic Farm web site for oodles of great info on so many aspects of garlic; growing it, cooking with it, health benefits etc. And if you haven’t yet got your garlic to plant you can read about the different varieties that they grow at The Garlic Farm on the Isle of Wight and then order them direct from the web site or other sites or you may find them in your local garden centre.
As for the products on the site I can definitely recommend the ‘Garlic Twist’ and also the rubber garlic peeler, both quite useful if you often cook with garlic (and I have tried out many garlic gadgets in my time). I can also testify that the stainless steel ‘soap’ does actually work, although I don’t bother to use it that often. I’m not saying that the best prices are on this site but I do love these products.
I also have my eye on that lovely glass chopping board. I may treat myself to that soon and design my new kitchen decor around those colours, even though I don’t need another chopping board!
And if you’re as mad about garlic as me you may be interested in the Garlic Festival in August.
Next on the ‘To Do’ list
Last week I got almost half the plot prepared for the ‘tatties’ having laid down the gypsum and then lots of those leaves I collected and then adding a good layer of that manure over the leaves. We do need more manure and could do with a lot more so planning to hire a 3.5 ton tipper truck very soon which should mean that for under £100 we will be able to get another 5 tons of the lovely rotted manure to finish off the plot for the spuds and also fill all of our yet unfilled raised beds.
So once we have all the manure in and laid over the gypsum and wet leaves we are ready to surface plant our spuds and reclaim the sitting room for ourselves! But that still leaves us well behind. Still don’t have many of the seeds that should already be sown in modules in the greenhouses!
Surface growing potatoes
I love this method. Way less work, same yeilds AND less slug damage to the tubers!!! AND less problems from volunteer plants the following season too! It is so simple. You just place them on top of the prepared soil and cover them with straw. As the plants grow you add more straw rather than ‘earthing up’ making sure that no light can get through or the tubers will be green. When they are ready just lift the straw and there they are, all ready on the surface for you to pick up (some will have worked their way under but they will be very shallow). You can take a few tubers from a plant and then replace the straw and leave the rest growing if you want to. The slugs don’t like the straw.
Need to try to squeeze in the time somehow!
Must get all my seeds ordered as soon as I can afford to place the order and get moving or we’ll have nothing to go with the Pommes Dauphinoise.
Posted in Soil Maintenance, Vegetables | 
Tags: garlic, leafmould, potato varieties, potatoes, rotted manure | 
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Siberia hits Suburbia – or – I Lost the Plots!
Time to finally get our 5 year rotation into full swing and whilst very excited at the prospects I’m hoping that my plans for the coming year are not too ambitious!
We also want to sort out that nightmare clay soil on what is meant to be the fruit and herb plot.
Totally given up trying to dig or rotovate it and decided to lay down some gypsum, topped with rotted leaves, topped with a thin layer of straw and finally a very thick layer of very well rotted manure.
Going to then surface grow potatoes on the entire plot and then sow a deep rooting green manure once the spuds have been harvested. The plan is to repeat the whole process again next year. And then yet again for a third year if we feel it is necessary.
By then I’m hoping that I will have some good soil to work with and all the raised beds will have been built and a lot of the plants propagated. These allotments can be very ‘long term’ things indeed!
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