Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

And whilst we wait for the rain to get our grass growing again, it's time for another look inside the polytunnel. We are now eating what is possibly our best ever crop of new potatoes. Back on 26th February we planted several 'Accent Early' seed potatoes (shown in the first photo sitting in an egg tray), we saw the first growth on 21st March, by 19th May we had a mass of flowers (second photo) and on the 4th June we dug up our first tubers (potatoes)! The third photo is of the potatoes we dug up tonight: all these from just one seed potato in less than four months!!! We weighed a few seed potatoes back in February and an average weight was around 80g. The weight of all the potatoes in the bowl is a whopping 1.9kg. This is a very impressive 'return'.
With that kind of growth and productivity it is not hard to see why potatoes are a major food source across many countries. They are in fact the fourth largest food crop in the world, following rice, wheat and maize. The potato was first cultivated in Peru around 8000 BC to 5000 BC, with the famous explorer Sir Walter Raleigh being credited with introducing it into Britain in the sixteenth century, although there is a 'story' that Elizabeth 1's kitchen served the haulms (leaves) and not the tubers (don't try this at home). Sir Walter was possibly lucky he did not get his head cut off as the haulms are poisonous!!!
The people of Peru have over 1000 words to describe the potato and there are supposedly around FIVE thousand different types of potato you can grow!! Incredible!!
And of course potatoes can get made into chips!!! We enjoyed ours as chips tonight with some local fish from Plymouth - it was actually a very healthy meal as our chips get cooked in an 'air fryer' where you use virtually no oil plus we had a fabulous variety of veg from our polytunnel too: carrots, garlic, courgette, onion and asparagus.