Potatoes Dug Up

Today was the day I finally dug up the 1st Early potatoes, Charlotte & Pentland Javelin, for winter storage.

But I must tell you all about my favorite digging fork, a Joseph Bentley - Potato Fork.

Having long and flattened/rounded Tines, it's the perfect tool for digging up Potatoes and most root crops, in fact I use it as my main digging fork it's so good.

The flat rounded tines are great for lessening damage to your Potatoes when digging, as they push the spud sideways instead of puncturing it. Today I dug up almost 100Lb of Spuds and only damaged about 6.


The head is wider than most forks at 7" wide and the Tines are 11" long, the overall length is 42" ideal for taller people, as I am.

The Joseph Bentley website is shown below, and their products are available from most D.I.Y shops, Garden Centers & the Internet.
http://www.josephbentley.org.uk
Find the Potato fork on the 'Traditional Seasonal Products' page.

Although I had trouble tracking down a Potato Fork but finally found one on a well known online auction site.





A trug containing 60Lb of Charlotte Potatoes, I also dug up 35Lb of Pentland Javelin.

As it was a lovely sunny day it was easy to dry them off after digging, spreading them out on the soil, then I bagged them up into Hessian Sacks obtained from Marshalls (web address link on last weeks Blog).



Each sack contains about 30Lb of Potatoes, as you can see the labels are the same ones used to mark the rows on the Allotment, recycling at it's best.

So it was a very busy day, again today, still have the main crop Cara to dig up yet!

As I said earlier the sun was shining and other harvesting was done:

Beetroot
Carrots
Cucumber
Runner Beans
Raspberries
and Squash

Thanks for reading/returning look out for next update. Ian.