The most disappointing potato harvest ever!

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This year has just been the worst I ever had for growing potatoes. Normally it’s so easy, you just stick a potato in the ground and a few months later you dig up a bucketful – at least that has been my previous experience! Of course it hasn’t always been completely trouble free – there have been problems with slugs or potato blight. But the drought this year was really bad. In spring I planted two varieties of seed potato, one for new potatoes and the other a maincrop variety but one I hadn’t tried before – Blue Danube. Well the new potatoes were disappointing, I would have to dig up two or three plants to get enough potatoes for one meal – but these were much worse. I didn’t want to devote a lot of space to potatoes since they are cheap to buy so I thought I would just try a small patch of these novelty blue variety. I planted eight seed potatoes and the volume of potatoes I harvested was somewhat less than I planted six months before, but instead of eight large potatoes I got a panful of small ones, the majority the size of marbles or even smaller. Imagine if we had to live on these until next spring! They were quite tasty at least. I made the lot into potato salad and we ate them as a starter and that was the end of that. I don’t even want to think about them any more . All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2026.