Christmas potatoes...

When I was working at the Dig The City Urban Garden Festival, I was working on the Festival Hub one day and listened to two people who had appeared on the Great Allotment Challenge on BBC a few months ago. They were very enthusiastic about their gardens and plants.

At the end of the talk they handed out some seed potatoes and a challenge to us to grow them through the autumn and harvest them just before Christmas to be eaten at lunch on the great day.

They told us how they should be planted up and did a demo. As I'd been working on the event and had got soaked to the skin running across St. Ann's Square to get potting compost for them, I was presented with the finished demo planting.

It's been done in a specially designed potato bag. This makes it easier to move if frost is threatened in the run up to Christmas. The seed potatoes are just beginning to shoot and what I need to do now is cover the shoots with compost until they come through again. Then cover, grow, cover, grow.... By December I should have a crop of delicious new potatoes to eat on Christmas Day. Watch this space...