Planting a late potato crop

I have to confess, we are a bit late in planting some of our potatoes. In an attempt to catch up, I spent part of today creating soil to go into potato growing bags. I used rotten down chicken manure, some silt from a large puddle that fills up on the allotment as soon as it rains, and some top soil from the bed on the allotment where we now have the henhouses. Therefore, this bed is no longer used for growing produce.

With the help of the hens, I mixed the soil together and then added it to the 9 bags. I planted rooster potatoes. The bags have been placed in front of the beehives. The ground there is hard and stoney so is useless for growing anything. It's an efficient use of the site.

I put some metre wide chicken wire around the bags to keep the hens off them. Were they to break down the defences and get into the bags, they would kick the soil and seed potatoes all over the place. They've done that to us before!



What I didn't want to do was buy commercial compost to use in the bags. Given the number of bags we have, this would have been an expensive undertaking. Furthermore, buying in what we can produce ourselves isn't exactly self-sufficient!