First Earlies for dinner tonight!

[Currysniffa]

Great stuff

I planted 3 bags of swift on the 25th of Feb so not long before I'm harvesting my first potatoes of the year, there's a lot of foliage so fingers crossed.

[flopsy]

they look lovely. enjoy eating them

[Paulieb]

Thought the time was right to bump this up, and might be good as a prompt for peeps to do the same this year. These are the details of the 4 early Morrisons bucket that I did last year.

All planted 15th Feb.
Casablanca - 2 tubers - dug 13th May - yield 140g
Casablanca - 2 tubers - dug 24th May - yield 260g
Sharpes Express - 2 tubers - dug 7th May - yield 412g
Sharpes Express - 1 tubers - dug 19th May - yield 675g

Quite varied results, but (although a very small sample) it suggests that variety makes a difference, and also less is more.
I tried to water, feed and treat them all with the same conditions (light/heat/etc).

This year I'm planning on planting one spud in one bucket on 10th Feb, then one every Sunday after that until mid-March when likely I'll plant the whole lot.

[veggiechicken]

Interesting!! Will you grow the same, or different varieties this year. The yield of Sharpe's is considerably more than Casablanca. On your results, will you be skipping Casablanca?

[Two_Sheds]

Casablanca - 2 tubers - dug 13th May - yield 140g
Casablanca - 2 tubers - dug 24th May - yield 260g

You can really see how much growth that was put on in that last fortnight, can't you?

[Paulieb]

Interesting!! Will you grow the same, or different varieties this year. The yield of Sharpe's is considerably more than Casablanca. On your results, will you be skipping Casablanca?

This year I've made use of a free postage offer from T&M, so my proper main first earlies will be Lady Christl.

I somehow managed to end up with an order for over 200 seed spuds (heaven only where they're going to go - although my mum said she'd have a few.

[Paulieb]

You can really see how much growth that was put on in that last fortnight, can't you?

Yeah - I think I've read previously that the tubers do the majority of bulking up right at the end, so this data (albeit not very much) shows this. The plants didn't start flowering or dieing back so I guess another 2-3 weeks would have meant even more faster and bigger bulking up.