On 2009-07-01 11:19:41 +0100, moghouse said:

On Jul 1, 10:57*am, soup wrote:

Does the panel think we can still have new potatoes at Christmas
or will it be a shop bought job? *

It's still six months to Christmas, plenty of time to grow a few
spuds.

I remember dear old Percy Thrower saying that when he first started as
a junior gardener at a large estate, the procedure was, when
harvesting new potatoes, to leave a few on the surface to go green and
then replant them to provide the small new ones for Christmas Day. If
it was good enough for Percy....

The other old country way was to harvest the potatoes, put them in a
cake tin and seal it with sticky tape. Then dig a hole and bury the
tin. Dig it up again at Christmas and - in theory - you should have
lovely fresh potatoes! That's something a youngster might enjoy doing
anyway, just as an experiment.
--
Sacha
www.hillhousenursery.com
Shrubs & perennials. Tender & exotics.
South Devon