Sarpo Mira (Main Crop)

I am taking advantage of a nice few days of dry sunshine and getting into the autumn tasks, specifically, lifting the main crop potatoes. This year, these are the Hungarian variety, Sarpo Mira. We had not heard of these before coming here despite 20 years of successful spud-bashing in Kent, but Mentor Anne recommends them for their blight resistance  and they are very popular in these parts for just that reason.

These went into one of my ridges on 1st April and, from the start, looked like being a do-er. The tops were always huge and a healthy dark green, swamping the ridge and the trenches either side so that I struggled to get access to them for weeding. The first earlies / salad potatoes in the ridge next door (Varieties 'Ratte' and 'Foremost') came and went, their haulms succumbing eventually to drought, exhaustion and a wee bit of blight, but the Mira soldiered on. In fact the Foremost did show a few blighted tubers and the Ratte are a bit disappointing - although the outsides look a bit marked, many of them show dark brown lesions below the skin which may be early-stage blight. We are having to sort through them hard and the rejects may end up getting fed to 'our' pig. More on him/her in a future post.

The haulms were still a very healthy green as I dug them today, prompting some Facebook friends to tell me I should have left them in the ground, but I think they did OK. We got this huge barrow load from the 14 m row and some of them are well up into the 600 g weight range. We cannot compete with Mentor Anne's two-pounder which she has adopted as a pet and named David Cameron, but we can almost do some meals out of a single spud!

Ah well. The crop is now safely gathered into the barn, with wind and heavy rain forecast for tomorrow morning so I am pleased that I have also been able to mulch up the ridge with a good 4 inch layer of John Deere Bob's calf muck (well rotted) and put it to bed. The worms will enjoy pulling all that down into the soil of the ridge through the winter. There were plenty of them. I was turning up some big fat ones while digging the spuds and the accompanying chickens were hoovering them up till, belly-full, they had to go off and have a lie down in the sunshine.

Good gardening! Lovely Harvest.

Borrowing the Tractor

 Local old boy and neighbour, John Deere Bob is becoming a firm friend and frequent visitor. He arrives at random times, chugging gently up the drive in his tractor, giving everyone a nice excuse to stop working, settles himself into "his" chair, accepts tea and sometimes a fig roll or two. He always protests that he can't eat that, or cake, because he's diabetic but Mum will charm him up and he usual gets persuaded to have one. Mum thinks he's very handsome.

He's a twinkly eyed old fella with a lovely sense of humour. He and his family have lived in this village for ever and he has a wealth of knowledge of all things local as well a sound knowledge of Irish history and old politics so he enjoys a good spar with Mum, who is also well versed in such things. Dad has been accepting loads of calf manure from his calf house, nipping down there to shovel muck into the box on the back of his tractor, while Bob did the tractor driving. They'd cleared Bob's barn and had started on a calf house belonging to Farmer McG (with his blessing).

 It was a nice surprise then, when on Saturday, out of nowhere, Bob showed up and suggested that Dad carry on with McG's calf house on his own on Monday while Bob was in Galway for medical attention, and Dad might borrow the tractor for the day to do this. Dad was delighted. He's driven a couple of Massey Fergusons in student jobs 35 years ago but has not sat in a tractor since, and never a John Deere. John Deere's were always seen as expensive, Rolls Royce style tractors - very posh, although we suspect that maybe JD have expanded the range downwards, and Bob's one may not be THAT exclusive!

Dad asked for a supervised practice session to re-acquaint with the works - starting has to be in neutral, stopping is with a "strangler", the three point linkage and hydraulics and the fancy gear box with its 'road' and 'work' ratios.

So, Monday came and Dad was up nice and early, walking down to McG's to find the tractor. The fun began. Dad shoveled 3 and a half loads out of the calf house in the morning. You can see the size of the box on the back of the tractor in my 5th picture. On the final load, he took his flat UK-style shovel down there so that he could give the calf house floor a really good scrape and clean, the way that Farmer McG might be suitably impressed and invite him back next year!

Now we have 6 or 7 neat piles of calf manure sitting in a row along the allotment waiting to be spread as each crop finishes, from which we can also borrow to fill raised beds as we complete them.

We love John Deere Bob!
Deefs