In normal times, I’d have been heading to Dundry Nurseries’ potato event this weekend to pick up some tubers and catch up with gardening friends.
It’s been a Gloucestershire institution for more than 20 years and draws crowds from across the county and beyond – people have been known to drive up from Devon for Potato Weekend.
Certainly, it was a family favourite when my children were small. They got to choose a few varieties – hence the year we grew ‘Asterix’ and ‘Obelix’ – and always planted up a tub each.
It’s also had novelty elements to the mix of garden club stands and how to grow information. The ‘Tato Gallery’ artwork was particularly popular – it was launched with a reworked Mona Lisa transformed by a potato head.
Potatoes are still on sale at Dundry Nurseries but, due to the pandemic, the event has been cancelled for the third year running and there’s a question mark over whether it will happen in the future.
The nursery has launched a successful mail order system for potatoes, and increasingly in recent years people have been turning up early to beat the rush – tubers are on sale from early January – making the actual Potato Weekend quieter.
“It does take a lot to organise,” Chris Evans, who owns the family-run nursery near Cheltenham, “but in my own mind I haven’t totally written it off.”
This year has also been hit by Brexit-related problems and the usual supplies from Holland were not available.
Even so, there are around 150 British-grown varieties on sale, with, as usual, a few interesting new ones added to the selection.
A new potato for Dundry is ‘Casablanca’, which Chris describes as a good, early white potato that’s very consistent.
“For anyone who wants to play with a bucket of potatoes, it’s very fast. Trials were suggesting that you could harvest it in 60 days from planting.”
Another new variety has been added “for sentimental reasons” as it’s called ‘Sally’, the name of one of Chris’ daughters. It’s a second early and gives big yields of evenly sized, yellow tubers.
“You always worry when something is a big cropper that you will lose something, but it hasn’t lost taste. It’s a good variety.”
‘Baby Lou’ is a maincrop potato that looks like a new potato with clean-skinned, golf ball-sized tubers that store well.
“It’s a maincrop so takes quite a long time to mature but in late September or October, you’re going to be harvesting potatoes that look like new potatoes.”
You can buy potatoes by weight or from one 25p tuber – even via the mail order system – as Chris believes part of the ethos of Dundry is persuading people to start gardening and potatoes are an easy place to begin.
“I want to persuade you to garden,” he says. “You’ve never gardened before in your life, and I sold you into the adventure of the extraordinary journey of the potato. You pop this potato in the ground, and it has the ability to turn itself in quite a short interval into 15 or 22 tubers.
“It’s magical and I’ve never lost touch with that magic. I think that for me is the joy of horticulture.”
Dundry Nurseries has a directory of potato varieties and mail order details on the website here.
I’ve written about how to grow potatoes here.
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