First potatoes!

In the name of Allah most gracious most merciful

28 August 2014

Here we are the first potatoes that we grew in the baths yay!

 Alhamdulilah, I harvested a few potatoes today because I was loathe to go out and buy some more what with the weather being so cold and rainy. The potatoes were about the palm of my hand and big enough for the pot, It is said that the first ones are by far the tastiest, its true, it was fabulous in the chicken curry tonight. One can in fact store them in the soil for a few weeks too as long as one keeps the soil a bit moist. Today was a perfect cool day to harvest.

It's been raining so much that the paths in the food garden flooded and because I plant in every space available, the mustard plants were knee deep in water and I was happy the water receded so I will not have to water for a few days now. But that does not deter us, gumboots on - we're in the garden. I am so getting some more baths to plant potatoes in. It can really become expensive. How's this for an initiative - if a few households plant potatoes and stagger the harvesting and share with one another we may never have to pay so much, in fact potatoes can reach R70 a bag.

So essentially I will be "chitting", ha ha. Here we can plant potatoes from August to June because we don't have frost.

chitting mid May

 So, lay the potatoes in a box or between eggs trays in bright light, but not direct sunlight. (The shade under a tree would be perfect)

You may cover them with some gardening hessian to help keep the moisture in.

Sprinkle water over the potatoes at least once a day. The idea here is to get the potatoes to ‘chit’ or turn green.

Once the potatoes have started to sprout eyes you can then plant them into your beds or your bath or tyres. I actually cut them up when I plant them according to how many "eyes" have formed.

I placed cardboard at the bottom of the baths and placed a layer of well composted soil. positioned the potatoes about 40 cm apart and covered them with about 30 cm of soil and as they progressed, so I added more soil. So try it, what do you have to lose? Either in directly in the ground, in baths, in bags or in tyres!

The sweet potatoes I placed over jars of water and now that they are all greened up will place their slips into a bath too inshaAllah.

Grow potatoes and start chitting.

Have a Mubarak Jumuah

Yasmine