Got a bit of gleaning in today (oooohh, my back!)

[bobnewboy]

Got a call from one of my village farmer friends last night. His potato field had been harvested, and he said I could do some gleaning if I liked. I thanked him kindly and put out my old clothes to go and have a look today.

When I first looked round the field there were plenty of smaller spuds that had fallen from the harvester, but were pristine. Into the bucket with them….

https://flic.kr/p/2rssXjj

Then on wandering (not lost!) I found a partially harvested row, and got busy with my garden fork. Fortunately the ground was only damp rather than wet, so digging was reasonably straightforward. Also I could safely drive my car onto the field (with permission), which saved a heck of a lot of walking back and forth with full buckets.

Anyway after an hour or two I had enough spuds to feed us probably through the winter:

https://flic.kr/p/2rsrPyi

I’ll be sure to buy him a drink on Thursday night when we meet up at the pub - spoof night

 

[Pattree]

That’s fantastic! Well done.
Many of those look full retail sized.
We used to call the small spuds “chats”. They were sold here as pig feed.

Now they are called salad potatoes and sold at a premium!!

Will you build a clamp for them?

 

[bobnewboy]

That’s fantastic! Well done.
Many of those look full retail sized.
We used to call the small spuds “chats”. They were sold here as pig feed.

Now they are called salad potatoes and sold at a premium!!
Em
Will you build a clamp for them?

No. We’re fortunate that we have some cool dry dark places to store them. We will separate them roughly by size, then let them dry off a little under newspapers to exclude the light. Then we will check them for sound condition and layer them either in paper potato sacks or net sacks, and move them into our under stair storage. They do seem to keep fine like that and it’s easy to take some for use. Eventually there will be some leggy ones left, but they will go into our own garden tubs as seed spuds, starting the cycle again

 

[Chris]

Today I learned what ‘glean’ means, having used it in other contexts lots of times without even thinking about it.

Nice haul there. In Yorkshire I believe that would be called two portions of mash.

 

[Tengu]

Thats a grand haul.

I have tater envy.