Earlier in the year, whilst Didi was away visiting her parents, I took the decisive step of digging potato trenches in the front garden. We’d been talking about it for a while, but turning our “talk” into “action” felt a little odd at first. After all, it’s not standard practice to use your front garden this way – but, in the search for extra growing space, we decided to be creative.
As the year progressed, we discovered that the decision to grow potatoes was one of the best things we did in the vegetable garden this year. They are incredibly easy to grow and require hardly any maintenance. This is because the large plants cover the ground well and therefore shade-out any weeds before they take hold. All we needed to do was make sure they were “earthed up” and watered sufficiently during the somewhat dry summer we experienced (just like last year). But apart from that, the potato plants just sat happily at the front of our bungalow, quietly producing the crop we would savour this autumn.
We waited until September to start digging them up and since then have not needed to buy any potatoes from the shops. We’ve been amazed at the quantity a small potato bed can produce and wish we’d measured the yield. The bed measures about 3 metres x 3 metres, and we must have had a least four crates full like the one in the photo above.
This weekend we lifted the remaining crop to store in the garage. It looks like we won’t be buying potatoes for a while. So who’s laughing now?
The front garden potatoes have been a turning point in our city vegetable gardening. From now on we might not put so much effort into making the front garden a neat companion planted mix of flowers and veg. It might take on more of an allotment feel. It is our best growing space after all. (David)
