A Community Growing Initiative
It’s mid July and hopefully your potatoes are growing well. For some of you it may even be time to start lifting and eating them!
The second earlies that we gave out, Maris Peer and Charlotte, should be ready after 13 weeks of you planting them. The Salad Blues are also a second early as well as a maincrop, although they will be slightly smaller if you take them sooner rather than later.
Our rule of thumb is that you can harvest at least 2 weeks after the flowers have bloomed and died off. We have lots of information and pictures about harvesting on our website.
We are also starting to arrange our community events for you to get involved in. Hopefully you will have grown enough to give us some of your crop back – we will be using these for cooking demonstrations and tastings, with any excess you give us given to foodbanks in your local area so that as many people as possible can taste the difference in eating freshly grown produce. Details of these will be sent out very soon – we hope you will be able to take part.
Can we also ask if you would record the number and weight of potatoes that you have grown. We will be sending out a small questionnaire with our community event email so we can track this. It will help us decide which varieties have been successful and which ones we will offer in the future.
We are also hard at work on the next stage of our project and we will send out more information about this when we have the details finalised. Let’s just say if you are growing in bags, don’t throw away the soil/compost you are growing the potatoes in, or the bags!
We would really like to know how your seed potato growing is getting on. Individuals and groups have been posting their pictures onto our website and our Facebook page, and you can too!
We are also available for any questions you have on the growing process. You can contact us:
By Email to oneseedforward@gmail.com
By Blog on oneseedforward.co.uk
or message our One Seed Forward Facebook page
Happy growing!