RETURNING from a week’s holiday to weedy potato mounds, I realised it was time to harvest the maincrop spuds.

Last year’s crop kept us going well into March so I stuck with growing tried and tested varieties this season, the red-eyed Cara, waxy fleshed Valor and red skinned Setanta.

All three varieties are renowned for being good storers, have a high resistance to blight and other potato diseases and a test dig revealed they had bulked up nicely over the last month.

Potato harvesting needs to be undertaken on a warm, preferably sunny, day in order that the tubers can be left out to dry for a couple of hours on the ground.

If you leave them out for too long they will start to go green and will be no good for storing or eating.

If they are very earthy, brush off carefully by hand any excess but by leaving them out to dry, any large clods usually come off naturally.

Any remaining foliage and roots should be burned or binned and not put on the compost heap to prevent the slightest possibility of any blight spores or any of the other potato diseases being recycled back into the plot.

Once lifted and dried off, the tubers are stored in double thickness paper sacks (or you can use hessian sacks), tied at the neck and then kept in a dark, cool, frost proof place.

If you store them in a garage, make sure they are rodent proof.