Early morning spuds - The Accidental Smallholder

Posted: Thursday 5 February, 2004

by Dan at 4:09pm in Anything goes Comments closed

Yesterday morning I managed to get an hour outside from 7am before getting ready for work. I love that time of day and am so happy that with every passing day we're getting extra minutes of light in the morning. It's strange that I seem to achieve more around the smallholding in the early hours than at any other time, yet at work I get my best results after about 4pm.

Anyway, I used the time productively and apart from getting the worms successfully into their new home I also moved the potatoes from their dark resting place into the light of our potting shed. In previous years during the months of February and March I've taken over the front hall of our cottage with egg boxes full of sprouting spuds, but this autumn we had the hall redecorated and I think Rosemary would flip if I filled it with spuds now.

The solution was an old, empty chest of drawers in our garage. The seed potatoes had been resting in the drawers in egg boxes for a couple of weeks, and on investigation yesterday were seen to have wee shoots emerging. That's the sign that they need to be moved from the dark to the light, and it was an easy task to remove the drawers from the chest and carry them into the shed where they'll be in the perfect environment to develop the strong shoots needed to give us a bumper crop.