Growing Potatoes

If you fancy growing potatoes, especially earlies. Then January is the month to buy your seed potatoes, and get them chitting.

This involves putting them in a light, cool place to start them chitting – which is basically sprouting.

The best container for this job is an egg box. It holds the potatoes in an upright position, and won’t sweat.

Look at each potato and decide which side has the most ‘eyes’ on it, put this side facing upwards.

Put them into your coolest room, where they will get plenty of light, but not direct sunlight.

You’ll see the little chits start to develop. They are ready to be planted when the these are around an inch long, 25mm. Although you don’t want to plant them out until late February or March.

I plant them in specifically bought potato bags, but any old compost bag (with holes pierced in the bottom), or very large pot will do.

You can plant them in the ground, but bags are so much easier.

Put around 4”/10cm of peat free compost, and or garden soil into the bottom – I like to mix both together.

Sit your chitted potatoes on top, with the shoots facing upwards. Approximately three to a bag.

Carefully cover with another 4”/10cm of compost. Watch out for the shoots coming up, and when they are around 3”/8cm, or a frost is forecast. Cover with another 4”/10cm, repeat this process until you reach the top of your container.

The most important thing with potatoes is to water them well. They will also benefit from some well rotted manure, mixed in.

The foliage can reach around 2-3ft/60-90cm.

They will be ready to harvest, approximately 10-12 weeks after planting. Either when they flower, or when the foliage starts to turn yellow.

My potato journey

When we first moved here over eight years ago, we built the raised vegetable beds almost immediately. In one of the beds we planted some main crop seed potatoes. They did very well, but I felt they didn’t really taste any better than shop bought potatoes.

This could have been down to the variety, as I didn’t do any research.

Another go with main crop potatoes

The following year I tried some red, main crop potatoes. They looked beautiful, but still didn’t have the flavour I was looking for.

I also made the mistake of growing potatoes in a bed, where I’d grown beans and peas the previous year. Legumes are known for leaving nitrogen deposits in the soil. This is is great if you want to grow brassicas next, but not so good for potatoes as it leads to too much foliage and not as many spuds!

My Food Growing Rules

The rules that dictate what makes it into the kitchen garden are as follows:

• It should taste better than shop bought – Most do!
• It is expensive to buy – eg. Asparagus
• You can’t buy it in the shops – eg. Heritage varieties
• It doesn’t keep well – eg. Salad

Let’s try some earlies

I decided that earlies were the way to go, and whilst looking through a seed catalogue, I saw some ‘Anya’ seed potatoes.

I knew I liked these as I’d been buying them for years. They have a gorgeous nutty flavour, and they didn’t disappoint!

Anya is a cross between the varieties Désirée and Pink Fir Apple, they are classed as a second early.

The crop was a success, but as they are a strange shape in the shops, they were even stranger in the garden!

It’s time to grow potatoes in bags!

When you harvest the crop, it is almost impossible to dig every last, tiny potato out. Resulting in the little tubers sprouting in the ground.

I’d now grown potatoes in the raised beds for a few years, and was getting more and more frustrated with potato shoots popping up everywhere.

At the end of that year, we dug the compost out down to ground level, and sieved it.

Would you believe we still had an odd shoot coming up the following year!

That was that, we were never putting potatoes into the beds again!

From then on we’ve only ever grown them in bags. Buying some specifically for the job, which we reuse every year.

Mums Favourite Potato

My mum grew up on a farm, where all of their fruit and veg were grown. She’s always said that the new potatoes her father grew were the best she’s ever tasted. The variety was ‘Aron pilot’.

In early January 2020, when I was walking around our local garden centre, guess what caught my eye?

Aron Pilot seed potatoes. Of course I had to have them, and I bought a bag full.

That night, talking to my now rather elderly mother on the phone. I told her what I’d found, and jokingly said to her “Well you’ll definitely have to live long enough to taste them now”. Little did I know we were all about to face a dangerous worldwide pandemic!

As my seed potatoes in their egg boxes, sat chitting in our bedroom. The country started to panic about rumoured shortages.

As a gardener I ordered a few more packets of seeds than usual, and went to buy my compost a little earlier than normal. In the knowledge that if something bad was about to happen, gardening would get me through!

As it became apparent that a lockdown was coming. I took one of my potato bags, some compost, with a few of the seed potatoes over to my great niece and nephews. I thought it might spark a gardening interest in them. But also be amazing for them to grow potatoes that their great, great granddad had grown.

We exchanged lockdown photos of their progress and then the harvest.

I’m pleased to report that my mum did get to try the ‘Aron Pilots’, but unfortunately they didn’t taste quite as good as she remembered. She advised me that I needed some good manure – something that was readily available on the farm!

This year I’m trying something very different. I’m going to be growing my first ever purple potatoes as part of ‘The purple potato project’.

This project is a wonderful idea, where Kinder Garden Cooks have joined forces with organics recycling firm Natural World Products (NWP) and Patch Seed Potatoes.

The aim is to get primary school children gardening, and growing food. It involves growing a brand new purple potato variety, that doesn’t even have a name yet. You are then encouraged to suggest a name for it.

I haven’t received my tubers yet, but you can be sure you’ll be reading all about it later in the year!

Stay safe & happy gardening.