Potato harvest day! It took 2 hours of careful digging, trying to avoid spearing any of the potatoes hiding in the earth. There weren’t a huge number per plant, but they were mostly of a reasonable size – with one particularly big one. Mum followed along weeding the bed as we went, so after all that work they’re about ready for manuring and putting to bed.

We picked the last (?) few beans and the last two sweetcorn that were worthwhile. A pear fell off the tree when we tried to get it better supported to take the weight of the fruit. I think it may be a hint that it’s time to pick the fruit.

Flower-wise the new asters on the ledge look great and the verbena is never-ending. I assume that the asters were somewhere in the seed I put down as part of the ledge renovations. What a success that little project turned out to be.

At home, I weighed the potatoes and roughly classified by them by damage and size, before putting them in their cute little hessian sacks. The damaged ones will get eaten first as they won’t store well. Quite a number of the spuds have common scab, but it’s purely superficial, so isn’t a problem. The total harvested weight was 20.219kg – the biggest potato weighing 388g. There’s nothing that isn’t exhausting about dealing with potatoes, including my desire to weight them, so I don’t think they’ll be part of the plan next year.