Next year’s allotment potatoes and onions

We’ve placed our order for seed potatoes, onions and shallots. In potatoes we chosen:

• Maris Bard: which is said to be a smooth white skinned variety and white flesh and the traditional new potato taste. A very early and heavy cropper with good drought resistance
• Wilja: this is our second early potato, it’s a heavy cropper with medium dry texture with a good frying colour and great for boiling
• Cara: which is a round and rather pink tuber especially round the eye areas. It’s a very good baking spud and withstands drought. The claim in that it’s highly disease resistant, including the dreaded and horrible blight.

Our shallots will be Golden Gourmet – a yellow shallot that is resistant to bolt and is said to store well through the winter and our onions are going to be Sturon – an early onion which should form medium sized globe-shaped with very good keeping qualities so it stores far into winter. The brochure says it offers good bolting resistance although bolting hasn’t been an issue for us so far.

This is a completely different set of varieties to the ones we grew this year and in part we’ve done that deliberately to see how different varieties compare on our soil. Our 2009 potatoes were:

• Accent – first early, highly productive – as shown in the photograph above!
• Pink Fir Apple – lovely salad potatoes, high cropping for us, but a bit of a fiddle to clean and prepare.
• Desiree – performed really badly for us, but that’s probably because our soil wasn’t as well prepared as we would have wished.

We don’t know what our shallots were - they were the tag end of a bag given to us by a neighbour, and we grew overwintering onions which we decided weren’t a great idea as although they are juicy and tasty, they don’t offer the same keeping qualities we’d like.

Labels: allotment-onions, allotment-potatoes, allotment-seed-potatoes, allotment-shallots