Rotten allotment tasks

Things I have discovered I hate doing:

Digging potatoes in the wet – I know we should have got them out of the ground when the weather was fine, but remember, strictly speaking they aren’t our potatoes: Duncan grew them and we felt he should have first dibs. Then the heavens opened and it doesn’t matter who dibs now, the spuds are lurking sullenly in clayey, gluey soil and are horrible to dig out. They have to be washed in a bucket of water before we take them home, where the first ones we dug could actually be laid out in the sun to toughen for a few hours before transporting home. If you can do that, they keep a lot better, but if you leave them in the sun for more than about eight hours they start to go green. Fat chance of that, this week!

Weeding in the wet – Yes, you can hoe, but if you have clay soil like us, even the sharpest hoe gets clogged with clay very quickly, so bucket number two (the one that doesn’t have potatoes in soak) has to be used to wash the clay off the hoe every few feet. Ugh.

And I hate not being able to get my storm kettle going ...

Labels: allotment-potatoes, allotment-rain, allotment-tasks-july, allotment-weeding