Disaster!

Never mind the global economic crisis, the floods in Pakistan or Wayne Rooney playing like Simon Smith.....this is a real disaster. I had this afternoon off and as it was raining I decided to empty out my 22 bags of Winston spuds. What a huge disappointment.

As you can see from the photos they have got more scabs on them than a whore's septum. I knew I was in trouble as soon as I emptied the first bag as the compost was just too dry. I barely managed to scrape together a few plates for showing at local level. The better ones came from the few bags that were reasonably moist. Getting a plate good enough to show at Malvern is out of the question. Some of the surface blemishes may rub off but they won't look great, but at local level they may well get me the odd place card if I can clean them up to a respectable level. The problem is they'll need quite a bit of vigorous scrubbing to get them looking half decent which is ok for a one day show. After two days they'll start to resemble a plate of badly bruised bollocks.

I think the problem is that Winston is such a beast of a potato, growing so vigorously and quickly it just literally sucks the moisture out the compost. Coupled with the heat of May and June and lack of any rain to note it has been impossible to get enough water into the bags. It even caused a lot of the tubers to split so we'll have to eat these first.

As usual, I had a few monsters despite leaving every single shoot on the seed tubers.

So, I have a large sack full of spuds for the kitchen. They may not be good enough to show but they'll be perfectly edible. A lot of people reckon Winston is tasteless but I love it roasted. Bloody good job really!

I'm hoping this is purely a problem with this variety. I had the same problem with the Winston that I grew for the early show a few weeks ago. Thankfully, the Kestrel seemed to stand up to the heat and water shortage a lot better so I'm hoping the same is going to be true of the rest of my varieties. I have about 50 bags to harvest in the coming weeks so I hope I haven't wasted all that effort. If so I'm going to be exhausting my vocabulary of swear words and will be looking for some new ones.