Sunday, November 28, 2010

Sun-burned potato plant

I promised my cousin Lenay before she visit her mother that I will harvest the potato that had died (or burned) due to the sudden increasing temperature that we had earlier this week. I chose today because my sisters are staying with me starting from today and like to give them an experience with potato harvesting and its weekend free from school.

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My sister had a fun time harvesting potato early this morning from containers and veggie patch like shown in the picture above. I would like to sow some gardening interest in my sisters so that my mama won’t have a difficult time to ask help around her garden. We harvested “Nicola” potato variety all of them that has been sun-burned. I did not expect to get much maybe only a few of baby potatoes because the plants were less than 3 months grown from tubers. We were surprised and happy that we actually harvested more than we thought and some are bigger than what is usually an average size of "Nicola“ variety.

DSC00023 Luckily I did plant some more potato tubers in September at the veggie patch in partial shade and it was not effected by this earlier week increased temperatures. The potato plant foliage is green and have not been disturbed by pests that much.

DSC00056 The day temperature is increasing and soon we will have days with above 30 degree Celcius everyday.It won’t be suitable to plant potato as it will be difficult for it to withstand the heat. So I am switching to sweet potato for this summer and grow them from tuber cutting and shoots.  Picture shown young shoots sprouted from a sweet potato section tuber. The young sweet potato plant did very well to withstand the blazing heat from earlier this week.

DSC00101 Note for growing potato this time around:

1) Avoid growing Nicola variety near to summer as they won’t stand a chance with the end spring~summer blazing sun. Preferably grow them in Autumn. Reliable variety even in short growing period still produce some spuds.

2) For spring planting, red coloured spud is more heat hardy to grow.

3) November a good time to start planting sweet potatoes.

I will try to grow different variety next time to see which suit the weather here best.

9 comments:

rainfield61 said...

Those potatoes look tasty.

How about curry chicken with potatoes?

takaeko said...

Sorry for your sun-burned potatoes. That showes how hot the heatwwave was in your place. In my case my potatoes were smaller than usual maybe because too hot summer.

Stephanie said...

Sweet potato is a good alternative :-D You have lots of potatoes there! For a dish I usually use three the most.

Your garden is always looking so pretty. Nice place for a BBQ meal :-D

btw, thanks for the seeds and arrangement...

Sue Garrett said...

-7.4 here so no fear of sunburn!!

kitchen flavours said...

Oh my goodness, your potatoes are lovely! Potatoes are really popular in my house, any way it is done! I grew some potatoes a couple of months back, the plants are strong and healthy and grew to about 12" high, then they just wilt and died suddenly. I was very disappointed! I wonder what went wrong! Hope your sweet potatoes will produce beautiful tubers, which reminds me that I have not had 'keledek goreng' in ages!

Mr. H. said...

Those are very nice looking potatoes.

Malar said...

Wow! That's a lot of potatoes!
You sister must be very excited to harvest potatoes!

Anonymous said...

It must have been hard seeing your hard work die. The potatoes you harvested looks really good.

Autumn Belle said...

Wow, that is a very good harvest! Your plant was very productive, due to your expertise. I really like potatoes in my chicken curry and curry puffs. I remember that most delicious jacket potatoes I had at Oliver's Sandwich and how I wish I can make that myself.

I sent you an email regarding your seed offer. Hope you received it.