March 17th 2008

We’re harvesting potatoes this week and I CAN’T BELIVE WHAT I’M SEEING.  We planted these potatoes very late for the Eastern Bay because it is always dry over summer, in late November. We then had rain and a long drought and have recently had a little rain. They have had no watering or irrigation. Yesterday I began counting the potatoes as I pulled them up. I counted 70 potatoes on one Paraketia plant and the others are similar.  (Taiamai counted 130 on a Karoro plant  the next day) We only hilled them up once using the new wheel hoe, and they should have been done twice. They got no looking after other than a light feed of Nature’s Garden when planted and a weekly Vege Foliar because the soil test was so bad.

Karoro potatoes - up to130 per plant

I half expected them to have cooked in the ground, the soil was too hot to walk on in February! The tops on them were over a metre in length and huge…

Kowiniwini - good crops and great large sized potatoes

Quite a few of the potatoes are not bigger than egg size, by the look of it because they weren’t hilled up again, rather than the lack of water or anything else, but loads of them were huge. I’ve never seen anything like it. If we could get all the conditions right I think we could harvest 10kg of potatoes from each plant. There was no blight either in the whole field , and we planted 100 kg of seed potatoes. Some of our varieties that often have not cropped well compared to others did really well. Karoro cropped as well as Whataroa and even Kowiniwini cropped really well. The other thing that really surprised me was that Urenika which in heaver soils needs a lot a longer to make a good crop, did really well in the same time as the others. Perhaps it would have done better if left in longer but the crop was heavy anyway.

Paraketia - these potatoes grow on runners and can be

found quite a distance from the seed potato planted,.... huge crops

I have found an easy way to make char grilled sweet peppers, could be hot peppers too. Instead of using a barbeque which I don’t have or flames which I don’t have at the moment, I put the peppers in a heavy cast iron pot with a lid and turned the element on pretty high. The skin of the peppers burns and I kept turning them over until charred on all sides. Once they were cooked and charred I just put the lid on, took the pot off the stove and let them steam until cold. I then took them out and the skins just slipped off leaving perfect char grilled peppers for salads, soups, side dishes etc .. Store in the fridge in olive oil and a garlic clove or two and a little sea salt. Delicious! Anahiem and Hungarian Yellow wax are great done like this too, for use in everything!

Kay