Diggin' for gold

The potatoes that were planted in the ground need to be harvested.

I've noticed a marked difference between the potatoes in the ground and those that were planted in the bags. Firstly the ground potatoes are bigger. Secondly, there aren't as many. Thirdly... it's a lot harder work to harvest them. Digging as opposed to simply up-ending the bags.

So which do I prefer? Well I think the bagged spuds did better overall. Perhaps if I had added a greater amount of soil on top it might have helped the size of the spuds. But the only drawback with the bagged spuds was that the leaves suffered from slugs very early on. I'm sure that didn't help much, and probably contributed a good deal to the overall performance.

What will I do next year? Bags again I think. The heavy clay soil of the London allotments means it's actually quite tough to dig. The rains at the start of the year seemed to have turned the deeper parts of the allotment into concrete, despite serious digging.

On another part of the plot though, I think I have a problem with my broad beans. They seem to have developed a blight of some sort.

The beans themselves are fine. But the leaves look terrible. Anyway, simple way to deal with that. Harvest the beans, and chop them down.