Main Crop Potatoes - Sarpo Mira

Main Crop Potatoes - Sarpo Mira

The main crop potatoes are 20 to 21 weeks old and can start being harvested. Back in mid April I planted 1.5kg of seed potatoes and today I harvested half of them. I had intended to earth up these potatoes more than I did and one or two potatoes were poking through the surface and I was a little worried about them being green. I needn't have worried as the foliage of the potatoes was so thick that no weeds and therefore not much light had got through to the soil.

The first and second earlies that were dug were inconsistent from plant to plant but the main crop was very consistent. Some of the potatoes are large, plenty large enough for baked potatoes and chips.

Sarpo Mira - Main Crop

The photo shows some of the larger potatoes and although I am very pleased with the larger potatoes there are just as many small ones as there are large. Also lots of good standard size. The crop is probably split into thirds, with a third being small, medium and large. 

I'm hoping the small are good for boiling, mediums are good for roasting and large for jackets and chips. That's the theory anyway :)

26kg (50% of main crop)

This represents 50% of the total harvest with the other half still in the ground and I'll leave the others for another week or 3.

26kg for this half and presumably the half still in the ground will be at least as much and possibly a couple of kg heavier for the extra  time which should make the total harvest 52+ kg from 1.5kg seed potatoes.

Hopefully they will dry over the next couple of days with the strong wind and will be ready for storing and selling some at the Alford Country Market on Tuesday. Apart from a few (6) there is almost no slug damage. The ones that are damaged have wasp damage, as 3 of the 6 still had wasps in the damaged area. Despite being in the ground longer than the Pentland Javelin and Charlotte earlies the Sarpo Mira has a lot less damage.

Next year we'll have to give the Pentland Javelin a miss, it certainly isn't good enough in our conditions to warrant the space because of the variability between plants and the amount of slug and other burrowing creepy crawly damage. Providing the Mira store I think we'll be doing these again, along with another main crop variety. 

The total potato harvest this year looks to be between 90 and 100kg, and depending on how these main crop sell at the country market we may have to double the crop for next year. The earlies have sold reasonably well and I now have another selling outlet for next year.