I do not like pickled red beets, and neither does my father. But my mother likes them so I sown two packets of seed into one bed about 3×1,5 m. They did not look like much for most of the summer but like the pumpkins, they took off in August rather spectacularly. I was expecting a harvest of about 6 kg, I got 18.

There were some impressive specimens in there, but there was also a lot of vole damage. About half the roots were gnawed on, some almost completely eaten. I would prefer if those fuckers were at least systematic in their damage and ate the whole root before starting to nibble on another. It is a lot more work to process a damaged root.

Even so, the harvest was significant and I just spent three whole days mostly working on this. We only have one pressure cooker and some beets were so big that they took up most of the space inside so it was almost non-stop boiling. My mother then peeled them and chopped them up to her preferred size and we canned them.

It was a lot of work for little financial gain since pickled beets are fairly cheap. Financially, we would be actually losing money on this if I had better use of my time. But I don’t so my mother now has two-years worth of beets to snack when she wants to.

This does bring up a thing that has been on my mind a lot lately. I looked up some gardening things on YouTube and as it is, the algorithm started to recommend a lot of gardening videos all of a sudden. Some of them are good and I am always happy to learn, some are entertaining but not worth much, and some are downright fraudulent and/or stoopid (like pretending to grow a banana plant from banana peel).

It seems that there is a big fad going around about self-sufficiency and sustainability and these beets are a prime example of why that is simply not possible for most people.

I have over thirty years of experience in gardening and I have a huge garden (over 1500 ㎡). I also have very poor and rocky soil in my garden, and slugs, and water voles. But even if I had the best chernozem there is, and ideal pest control (cats, btw, do not usually hunt water voles, though their presence does deter them a bit), I could not be self-sufficient even if I did nothing else. Because whilst I can pull sometimes really impressive harvests even with the poor soil I have, and I could have rabbits, a goat, and/or poultry to eat the non-edible parts of plants and grass and slugs, etc. there is still one thing that can throw a stick into the spokes that is completely unpredictable and uncontrollable – the weather.

I wrote about how bad things looked in the summer this year. Some crops bounced back, some didn’t – very little onions and garlic, almost no strawberries (although that was intentional), no nuts, and no tree fruit whatsoever. And that is how things always go in small-scale growing. I can grow in a good year enough of some specific crop to last more than one year, but never the full spectrum and if it can’t be reliably preserved, it is waste anyway. To grow a full, balanced diet reliably, large-scale growing and, more importantly, trade over large-ish distances, are necessary.

For the last few years, I have regularly grown three potato varieties – Marabel, Esme, and Dali. All three performed reasonably well, and I had some spectacular harvests. You may remember my last year’s experiment with growing potatoes under grass clipping, without tilling the soil. From less than one kg of tiny potatoes, I got approximately 40 kg of reasonably sized ones so I decided to try the same thing on a large scale, i.e. on my 40 m² vegetable patch. I bought 10 kg of seeding potatoes from each of the above-mentioned varieties. I also planted again a mixture of all three varieties in the form of tiny potatoes left over from the previous year.

In the pictures here are all the potatoes from the main patch, not those from the secondary one.

First Marabel, a yellow variety with pale, whiteish flesh.

This variety started to sprout first and thus was the most negatively damaged by the late frost. I got about 36 kg of potatoes fit for storage and about 6 kg of damaged potatoes that had to be processed straight away.

Then Esme, red potatoes with bright yellow yet floury flesh.

These sprouted later and the plants did not look all that impressive, but there were more seeding potatoes in the 10 kg than of the previous variety, they were smaller. I got about 71 kg suitable for storage and again circa 6 kg that had to be processed immediately.

And lastly, Dali, a yellow variety with bright yellow, firm flesh.

With this variety, the seedling potatoes were smaller too and thus there were more of them. I harvested approximately 61 kg fit for storage and about 8 kg to process immediately. It was also this variety that gave me the biggest potato of this year, an 850 g chunk.

The overall harvest was thus circa 168 kg for storage and circa 20 kg of potatoes that had to be processed immediately (and those 20 kg are weighed after they were processed and all the waste thrown out btw). In the end, approximately 190 kg was harvested from 30 kg of seeding potatoes. Enough to meet all our needs for the next six months and we will have to spend a significant amount of time during winter to dehydrate or otherwise conserve them because we certainly won’t manage to eat them all before the weather starts to warm and they start sprouting. The cellar is rather cramped.

So why I am not completely satisfied with the result?

Firstly from 30 kg of seeding potatoes, I would need to harvest at least 250 kg to be satisfied and 300 kg to be impressed. I estimated earlier that about 20 % of my potato patch was heavily damaged by the late frost, and that now appears to be a really good estimation – those 20 % are approximately what is missing to reach the desired 250 kg.

Secondly, an occasional impressive specimen notwithstanding, most of these potatoes are really small and quite a lot of them are partially green so there will be a lot of waste even from those in storage (and I will have to take care to ventilate the cellar properly to avoid build-up of noxious gasses). This is in part due to the used method – I did not have quite enough grass to cover the whole patch with a thick enough layer and as I mentioned previously, I lost some of that grass to strong winds in dry weather shortly after I planted the potatoes. As a result, they were partially exposed to the sun and that is not good. Partially green potatoes are edible, but all the green stuff needs to be cut away and thus I can expect about 5 to 10% waste. It is a thing to consider when trying this method in the future again.

Thirdly, that over 10% were so badly damaged by pests – voles and insects – is a bad sign. One of the reasons for trying the no-till method of growing potatoes was to prevent impaling a significant portion on the fork or cutting them with the plow. When growing potatoes the traditional way, I had higher yields and less pest damage.

Fourthly, I had a higher-than-usual amount of tiny potatoes under 2 cm – an estimated 10 kg. Normally those can be carefully washed and fried/baked with skin and eaten whole. But this year most of them are partially green so they are useless – they are too small to peel and cut off the green stuff and too green to eat whole. I will plant some next year, but the truth of the matter is, they are mostly waste.

As far as labor savings go, it was significantly less work to both plant and harvest them. I cannot complain about that at all, even though it was still a lot of work and after three days of picking, washing, drying, and weighing potatoes I was completely knackered.

In conclusion, the no-till method of growing potatoes has its plusses but significant pitfalls too. The potatoes are more susceptible to both weather and pests and tend to produce a lot of greens.

I will probably plow the patch now to mix in the old grass and the charcoal I added in the spring. Next year it will be peas, onions, and beans all around. I will cover a part of the lawn with grass clippings again to plant the leftover green and tiny potatoes in the spring, but I won’t be buying proper seeding potatoes next year. And the year after that, when I grow potatoes in the main patch again, I will probably return to the traditional method to get a higher yield from fewer seedings.