Home Bred Potatoes

The central row of potatoes in the picture below is of three varieties I kept from a grow out of seedlings from Nepalese potatoes someone brought back to Ireland a few years ago. The mother plants were big and sprawled all over the garden. We didn't like the taste much, but they had terrific blight resistance. I blogged about them last year when we harvested them in the autumn. They are the central row in the picture below, which shows how much bigger they are than the Sarpos on either side. The original seed potatoes were bigger than the Sarpo seed, but the Sarpos don't seem to have coped with the dry spell, as well as other varieties. The field they are growing in only has about a foot of soil so the affects of the drought were clear when this photo was taken at the end of June.

I just lifted one plant from each variety and you can see that the white 'Autumns' yielded the best. The pink and white 'Susans' also did well but the pink 'Hollys' did not yield much at all. The small pot of white potatoes at the back are 'Colleen' which I added for comparison. They are my standard early potato.
The next photo is of them cooked. We thought they all tasted as good as the Colleens but were still pretty immature, especially the pink ones. All the plants are still growing well and showing no signs of blight.