The Potato Mines

It’s been too hot to sit outside beyond 10am here through much of August, let alone work. There’s no pleasure in barefoot gardening when the grassy areas are worn down to straw and bare earth, especially as we have a cedar tree that sheds dead needles all year round (and needles is the word for it – tough, sharp, driving into the skin when I tread on them). I have very tough skin on my feet but the cedar needles go straight through the hard outer layer and stick upright, driving further in with every step.

It rained elsewhere in Suffolk and Essex in mid-August – flooded a couple of businesses three miles away, briefly flooded the streets of towns within ten miles of us – but nothing here till Wednesday. On Wednesday, it rained heavily all day, big hefty blobs of rain and some thunder too. The pond is now full to within a couple of inches from the top, the fish are coming to the surface and it’s cool enough to work outside.

The first job I tackled after the weather cooled was to dig up the potatoes. I tried following advice this year, not planting too many or too close together, planted in long trenches and earthed up every week. It’s worked. Digging them up this afternoon was like digging in potato mines – they were packed together in great clumps, large potatoes stacked one on top of another.

There’s more yet to do, but first I’ll need to wash these and store them. In theory, these are stored in a clamp – the potatoes covered with straw and earth or sand packed around the straw. Basically, bury them again. Which sounds daft – why not leave them in the ground where they grew? – until you look closely at the soil they grew in. Tiny thin worms. Possibly eelworms. Not taking any chances. Next year, the potatoes will be planted in a different row, avoiding the eelworms and slugs that have been drawn to this year’s crop.

Clipping the spare shoots off the cucumber vines is a constant job. Cucumber and melon vines grow side-shoots from the joint between main stem and leaf, exactly as tomato plants do, and it’s best to remove those as soon as they form. I have had the experience of letting those just grow, and not being able to get into the polytunnel without treading on vines sprawling across the path. We spent two days that year cutting back those shoots, disappearing into thickets of vines snaking across the floor and taking barrow-loads of vine cuttings away to be dumped. These days I get in there twice a week to prune back the sideshoots and tie up the new growth to the ropes. Each plant has a thick twine tied to the crop bars seven feet off the floor to grow up (you can just see it in the photo, with knots in it for the ties to grip and not slide down like Nora Batty’s tights).

I’ve had an interesting exchange with the Real Seeds this week. Almost all of the seeds I plant are bought through this company. They supply seeds of rare and heritage plants – those plants that didn’t make it into the commercial seed catalogues when the regulations tightened. There are plants in their catalogue that were developed to withstand Siberian winters, to grow six foot tall cabbage ‘trees’ and to make onion plants walk across the veg plot. There’s instructions on their website on saving seeds from the plants you grow from the seeds you buy from them, so that (in theory) you buy a packet of seed from them once, treat them well, and have seed for that plant for the rest of your life. I haven’t made it work yet, but I have had some success – parsnip doesn’t just make seed, it spreads it all around and lets an army of parsnips spring up next year. Cucumbers, though…

In 2021, Real Seeds stated that they were not going to stock Gerghana seed until 2025. Gerghana is my favourite cucumber (alongside Tamra) – straight, green, sweet and with small soft seeds. I was running out of Gerghana seeds then – just six left, and not all of them survive to ‘adult’ status. So I did what Real Seed recommend and planted only Gerghana cucumbers in the tunnel last year, so that every cucumber plant was pollinated by Gerghanas and every seed was of pure Gerghana stock. I took five cucumbers at the end of the season and followed instructions, scooping out the core and soaking it in a jar of water, shaking it and renewing the water every few days until all the jelly had been flushed away. Then I removed all the seeds that floated, laid the rest out to dry on paper for a week and poured them into seed packets.

This is what I used for the cucumber plants this year. I was really proud of myself until I tasted one. Bitter. Nothing like last year’s crop. If I picked a young cucumber, it tasted sweet – but only on first picking. Cut the cucumber and come back to it a few hours later, and that bitter taste was there. What’s worse, cucumbers are curcubaticeae – members of the squash / gourd / courgette family. Anyone remember the bitter courgettes grown from seed last year? The ones that caused sickness, stomach cramps and hospital stays? That was down to the parent plants being cross pollinated by wild courgette plants growing near their field. Wild cucumbers in Essex… there’s a story in that.

I asked Real Seeds for their advice. Within 24 hours, they came back to me with a very kind and informative email. Apparently, it’s more likely to be the result of large variations in temperature or water stress – and we have had temperatures between 49 degrees C and 20 degrees C in the tunnel this year, and the soil has dried out sometimes despite being well watered every evening. So it’s likely. They advised me to take off all the mature fruits, let the younger fruits develop in these cooler temperatures and go on picking the fruit for use when it’s small – using the lot in one go, as it does develop a bitter taste after being cut.

Well, as South Park would say, I learned something today. How to grow sweet cucumbers in exceptionally hot weather. That I did do the seed-saving right last year, and I can go on using those seeds. And that small seed companies are the absolute best. Kate’s email to me was like a good friend’s advice to a less experienced gardener – encouraging, reassuring and informative. Real Seeds Company for all the seeds I buy from now on.