Tag Archives: potatoes

Postcard from Chelsea: Edible Chelsea

26 Friday May 2017

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Great to see the veg back at Chelsea. We had a brief flurry of edible love back in the mid-noughties, when the GYO trend was riding high, but in recent years they’ve gone back to hiding behind the skirts of flouncier irises, alliums and other glamourpusses.

No longer. This year there were pistachios on the Best in Show garden and potatoes in the Pavilion (to be fair, they never really went away). Even the RHS Plant of the Year was an edible (the genuinely ground-breaking dwarf mulberry ‘Charlotte Russe’). For a dedicated food grower like me, it was heaven.

The Chris Evans Taste Garden


I really liked the Radio 2 Feel Good gardens this year. They had all the Chelsea pizazz but were more accessible than the more highbrow show gardens: these were true crowd-pleasers, and unashamedly so. None more than the Chris Evans Taste Garden, designed by talented edibles specialist Jon Wheatley and packed with astonishingly perfect vegetables grown by Suttons Seeds’ secret weapon, Terry Porter, whose slightly arcane specialism is producing show-standard vegetables out of season for the flower shows.

I loved everything about this garden: and particularly the big trough full of cutting flowers at the back (including a ginger dahlia, ‘Cheyenne’, in tribute to Chris Evans’s famous carrot top). Just goes to show, you can squeeze a cutting garden in just about anywhere.

The Viking Cruises Garden of Inspiration (gold)

Sarah Eberle


My favourite of all the Artisan Gardens this year. And just look at that orange tree. I have seen orange trees in Italy, France and Florida. But never have I seen one as perfectly orangey as this one. Mouthwatering.

The Potato Story (gold)

Morrice and Ann Innes

Into the Pavilion now, and potato enthusiasts Morrice and Ann Innes became the first exhibit in the history of the show to win a gold medal for a display of potatoes. But what a display. I thought I know a bit about spuds, but came away from this realising quite how far I have yet to go. Morrice (resplendent in his kilt) told me he grows every single one of the 140 varieties on display each year. Only six or so tubers of each, granted, but they take up about half a hectare of back garden. Now that’s dedication.

Robinson Seed & Plants (Silver Gilt)

Loads of unusual veg on the immaculate Robinsons stand. Many, like achocha and cucamelons, I’ve grown already. But these snake gourds turned my head. Apparently, as well as eating them or making medicines from them, you can also turn them into didgeridoos. Who knew.

Also on the Robinsons stand was a rather fabulous edible wall, planted in pockets. This lot included American land cress, watercress, parsley, red-veined sorrel, Bull’s Blood beetroot, rocket, two types of lettuce, electric daisies, New Zealand spinach and asparagus peas. Not bad for a ‘wall’ that measured no more than about 3ft wide by 2ft high.

Tom Smith Plants (Silver Gilt)


And I just had to give a mention to the hottest exhibit in the Pavilion. One for masochists, sorry, chilli lovers everywhere, ‘Dragon’s Breath’ was bred pretty much by accident by Mike Smith, owner of Denbighshire nursery Tom Smith’s Plants. He sent the fruits off to Nottingham Trent University, and much to his surprise they returned with a scorching 2.48 million reading on the Scoville Heat scale. Just to put that into context, the current world record holder, the notorious Carolina Reaper, hits a mere 2.2 million. Mike is now awaiting confirmation from the Guinness Book of Records. Apparently if you were actually stupid enough to swallow one of these little fruits – just a couple of centimetres across – you would be fairly likely to die of anaphylactic shock. The law of natural selection in action, you might say.

Not the colorado beetle

27 Monday Jun 2011

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My poor new potatoes are suffering a nasty attack of early blight. Not quite as nasty as late blight, as the tubers don’t seem to get particularly badly hit, though the top growth is looking decidedly anaemic, not to say acne-ridden.

But that’s not what was worrying me this morning. As I bent to the fork to hoick the next lot of ‘Foremost’ into the colander I spotted this pair clamped to a leaf.

‘Oh, my goodness,’ I thought (or less printable words to that effect). ‘I’ve got colorado beetle!’

This is one of the alien invaders that everyone’s very, very nervous about. They skeletonise potato plants (and tomatoes, and aubergines): if you think blight is bad, it is as a minor sniffle compared to the colorado beetle.

The pest is established in France already: it can only be a matter of time before it skips the Channel. It’s certainly notifiable.

Now, normally the internet has just one function in these circumstances: convincing you that the headache you’ve suffered from all day is not a hangover but a terminal brain tumour. For once, though, it served to calm an over-heated imagination and demonstrate that actually, what you’ve got is rather less alarming than what you thought you’d got.

So on my way to the Defra website to send a panicky email to the appropriate authorities I discovered that this is what a real colorado beetle larva looks like.

(Released under commons licence)
As you can see, nothing like my little fellas. However the question remains unsolved: they are ugly little blighters and keep reminding me of ticks with the way they’re squat and tenacious and hold on with all their feet at the front. Here’s another pic.

So – any ideas? What have I got here? And should I – as I suspect I should – be doing something about them? Answers on a postcard (or failing that, in the comments section) please…

I’ve been got

29 Monday Sep 2008

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I thought it couldn’t be long – especially with the summer we’ve just had. Blight has made its first unwelcome appearance on the allotment.

The first you see is a few little harmless-looking brown spots like these.

The spots just get bigger and bigger…

… until they start destroying whole leaves, then the stems too.

Finally the poor potato plant ends up looking something like this – every leaf shrivelled, every stem brown and sick-looking. You shouldn’t let things get to this stage: when you first see the leaf-spots, remove the foliage completely, as rain will wash the fungal spores down through the soil and onto your potatoes otherwise (and you’ve never smelled anything bad until you’ve smelled a blighty potato).

The above photos were all taken on the same morning, of the same patch of potatoes (‘Desiree’, in case you’re interested) so it just goes to show that blight comes on in stages, and some bits can be worse affected than others.

Anyway – so now all those stems have been cut off at ground level, bagged up like toxic waste (never compost them – the spores overwinter) and thrown away. I haven’t quite dared lift the potatoes just yet: partly because I haven’t had the time, but also because I detest the slimy mess of a blight-infected potato slightly more than I detest cleaning my downstairs loo. So both tend to get left for a long time in the spirit of procrastination (which in both cases generally just makes the problem worse).

One last thing – these are my ‘Sarpo Mira’ blight-resistant potatoes, on the same morning, growing just eight feet away:

This has deepened my admiration for this spud variety even more. It’s a good roasting spud, though people say it falls apart if you boil it so it’s steaming only. Anyway, from now on I’m making them a regular on my seed spuds order – when potatoes grow this well when blight is rampant all around, it’s daft not to.