Spud Watch!

Hello to you!

Do you remember the seed potatoes?  The long forgotten seed potatoes from days of yore?  Well my friends, something happened.  The weather was sodding terrible!  Frost, snow, frost, snow, sleet in April, ugh!  Not potato weather that's for sure.  Monty Don made us promise, PROMISE not to put our spuds into the ground until the weather had taken a turn for the better, so unwilling to ignore the great Sir Monty of Don that's exactly what we did.  Wait.  We waited until the seed potatoes had become so flippin sprouty I started to get worried that we'd be digging spuds up in the house.  Eventually I cracked and decided that they had to go in the ground, frost or no frost.  Thankfully the weather lately has taken a little bit of a turn for the better, but in an ideal world we'd be past the point of ground frost and I'm not sure we're quite there yet in Blighty, so keep your fingers crossed for me.

So here's how it worked:

Carefully load seed potatoes into the bottom of "the big buggy" and push them up to the allotment.  Refuse to let anyone else push the buggy in case the tubers get snapped off rendering them useless.

Volunteer to be on "Baby Watch" whilst Mr Husband and Biscuit locate tools and generally get prepared.  "Baby Watch" is also a good excuse to take lots of photographs.  Apparently this can get quite annoying.  Bah!  I blog, therefore I photograph.  Live with it.

Prepare the ground ready for the seed potatoes to go in.  Essentially dig lots of long troughs which are not easy to photograph.  Like this:

Allow small children to assist.  They love it.  And they're handy.... Speaking of hands, notice Wiggles' little pink fist getting in on the act in the bottom left hand corner there....

Instruct husband to dig.  Biscuit helpfully points out where.....

More of the pointing.  Remove seed potatoes from beneath the buggy ready to go in the ground....

Carefully place the seed potatoes, rose end up, into the freshly dug troughs.  Be careful with those tubers!

THOSE TUBERS:

Insist small child does ALL the hard work.  How else will they learn?  

Space them out according to the growing instructions, this will vary a little depending on the variety.  Ooooh look, there's my shadow!!!

Wiggles gets involved.  Although she was easy confused by a picture of a potato compared to an actual potato...we've all been there....

Cover up the seed potatoes with soil; gently!  And don't stomp them down.  

Give the (now empty) egg boxes to mucky muddy little Wiggles to play with.  She spent ages enjoying these.  I have no idea why we buy her brightly coloured bits of musical plastic when old cardboard will do....

Mark out the potatoes so you know what is where.  This means you'll quickly and easily be able to tell which spuds you'll get to harvest first.

Plus they look fairly impressive, like little garden-y sailing boats.....

And then wait!  Wait for those cheeky spuds to start sprouting.......

Edge of your seats, right?