I harvested my first potatoes of the year, the very early variety “Bellarosa”.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Since I was growing these on top of the lawn under old compost mixed with some soil, moss, and tree leaves, I did not have to dig. I merely carefully raked the muck aside and picked the tubers off the ground. They did look quite nice, although they were not all nice. But that is normal.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Each of these crates contains 4 kg, except the far left one, which contains 2 kg of the smallest tubers. There were also approximately 8 kg of tubers that had various degrees of damage from mice, slugs, insects, or the rake. Those will need to be processed, i.e., eaten, fairly quickly.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I put aside 100 pieces of 40-60 g seed potatoes for next year because I do want to grow this variety again for the following reasons.

1. Overall, I harvested about 38 kg of potatoes from 5 kg of seed. This is not fantastic, but it is good, especially for a very early variety with very short vegetation.
2. There was no blight, and the pest damage is relatively minimal.
3. I am especially pleased with the size of the tubers and the ratio of big/small/tiny – I got 20 kg of big, 4 kg of small and just 2 kg of tiny tubers in shape good enough for storage, and that is good.
4. Since I grew them in the Ruth Stout method, it was relatively little work for quite reasonable gain.
5. Despite not being planted deep, the plants fared reasonably well in the heatwave.
6. Despite the heatwave, most of the tubers are quite nice-looking and not warty. Which is a cosmetic issue, but even so. They are also mostly round and not funny-shaped, which is a plus for peeling.

So although I am not super impressed, I am quite content with how this specific variety turned out. We will now cook a few meals with them and try to dehydrate them to see what uses they are best suited for.