Purple potatoes

A competition started at work last year - buy a potato for 20p, grow it, and photograph your crop of potatoes and the dish you cook with them. I didn't do it last year, but this year I decided to give it a try, and one of the varieties of potatoes available was this lovely purple variety.

I'm not really someone who goes in for spending a lot of time on my garden, so all I did with my potato was to shove it in a plastic trug of earth, heap a little more on when the stems began to grow, and I watered it about twice. The instructions said that the potatoes would be ready for harvest in September when the leaves began to go yellow.

My potato plant grew big quickly. Then, in July, it rained heavily for about two weeks. The earth was sodden. Every day I tipped out the excess water, and tried to decide what to do - there was nowhere I could put it that was sheltered and had light. And then it looked like it was dying, so I was ready to give up hope of getting any potatoes - I was sure that any that had started to form would have rotted!

The very next day, one of my colleagues posted a photo of her crop of purple potatoes! I realised there might be hope for mine after all, so I dashed out to the garden and clawed through the waterlogged earth. And I found potatoes!

They varied in size from the size of a small pebble to the size of an average potato, and there were enough of them to make two meals!

I roasted the potatoes with a chicken leg, lemon, olive oil, garlic, thyme and rosemary. And they were delicious! I served this with some ranch salad.