Potatoes Lifted!

It's been a hard weekend's work, but ultimately quite successful. We finished painting all the windows: cleaning the 'old' ones (sitting and dining room front windows) was really time-consuming, and took as long as painting, but they're done, as are the second coats on all the new windows. While we were about it, we also cleaned and repainted the door to the old coal cellar and the gate to the front garden. It's got a little too gloomy to be sure, but hopefully they'll both look nice and bright white again.

More excitingly, we also lifted all the potatoes. These were planted in May, a bit later than normal, but they've done well. We've had some Belle de Fontenay, which are very tasty. We should have lifted the rest earlier, but they were almost all ok. Similarly, the pink fir apple should have come up sooner, and we lost some of these.

The Axona (red skinned) cropped quite well, and quite shallow-ly: the purple Blue Danube were much deeper, but perhaps lower yielding. The latter seems to have sent tubers off great distances, as we were finding distinctive purple tubers quite a long way from the haulms! There were only a few more King Edwards, and I think the remainder were Marfona (but no guarantee...we were a bit lax in labelling, in haste). Taste-test still to come, but—at the moment—I think we might plant Belle de la Fontaine, pink fir apple, and King Edward next year. And a few Blue Danube for fun.

For now, I've bagged the crop up in hessian sacks, and they're in the workshop.

Work on the kitchen has gone quite well this week: final plastering should be happening tomorrow, and then the fitting starts Tuesday. It should be finished by Friday, and there'll then be a couple of weeks' hiatus (in which we'll decorate!) before the floor goes down. The wait is to give the room to dry out a bit, to minimise swelling/shrinkage of the oak floor. I'm really looking forward to seeing the floor: I laid a few packs out on the sitting room floor, and they looked really attractive.