Year of tatties was not a cat-astrophe!
Gardening on the Edge by Diana Wayland
Now the drought is over, I look back on a year that turned out to feature, more than anything, tatties.
Not all of this is due to my husband's obsession with chips! I did buy more seed tatties this year than I ever have done.
Our regulars are Sharpe's Express and Kestrel. Although earlies, I treat these as maincrop simply due to our lower summer temperatures and shorter season. They are usually reliable.
However, this year I bought six kilograms of each! Normally I get four! Maybe I knew something? To these I added two "guest" tatties – four kilos of Sarpo Mira and two kilos of Maxine, both maincrop tatties.
They were chitting well when, in mid April, I broke my left wrist. Being left-handed this was an utter disaster, right at the start of the gardening season, but in the end it was a blessing.

Due to being unable to use my hand, our usual range of vegetable crops never got sown. My husband planted out our onions, plus shallots, already growing in the greenhouse, and about a hundred leeks, that we had sown in late March.
Under my guidance he sowed a few greenhouse vegetables, but they germinated poorly and did not do well due to the constant summer haars suppressing the temperatures.
My poor husband planted the mountain of chitted tatties in just about every bed in the kailyard, after adding sulphate of iron to lower the pH.
We also experimented this year by working in used wood pellet cat litter. After scrupulously removing any solid matter, my husband tipped it on, spread it and worked it in. Planting was a few days later, to reduce its likelihood of burning any new growth.
It worked! The shoots emerged, healthy and vigorous, and continued to grow extremely well despite the drought and our frankly intermittent watering. We started harvesting Kestrel in early September and were very pleased with the result – good sized (a few whoppers), little or no scab, no pest damage, and excellent yield. Sharpe' Express yielded less. It tends to.
But the one that astonished us was Sarpo Mira. This is a long red-skinned tatty. The size of some of these was immense! One tuber weighed over half a kilo and would (almost but not quite!) have fed both of us for one meal. The yield was also very high.
I will definitely buy this variety again!
Maxine did not do quite as well. These had a bit of scab, none were big and the yield was not as high. But the beds these came from lacked the used cat litter, although we had applied the sulphate of iron before planting.
So the cat litter apparently made a difference.
Top stories
-
‘Are you kidding?’ Stunned train passengers find seating cordoned off with packing tape
-
‘It was a tough operation’: Military historian tells of ‘phenomenal’ interest in wartime mission from Skitten
-
Shiver me timbers! Isabella Fortuna open to visitors on Wick pirate-themed day
-
Award-winning photographer Ken Crossan to host talk at Wick church
Due to our currently inexhaustible supply, this is being applied to all kailyard beds throughout the winter. I stress that all poo must be removed due to the risk of toxoplasmosis, but using it to add desperately-needed organic matter is much better than sending it all to landfill.
We switched to wood pellets only early this year, and find it so much better than what we used before, which we could never do this with.
What I honestly cannot answer is whether the cat pee in this was also partly responsible for the superb tatties we have had this year.
Or was it my husband's planting.....?