It’s the spud life
Sow your own potatoes and you’ll never look at chips the same way again
IF you want to grow some of your own veg this year and you are a beginner gardener, potatoes are a good place to start. You don’t even need a garden to do it – you can grow them in a container on a patio or balcony.
And once you have tasted a potato fresh from the ground, you’ll be hooked. I promise!
There are three types of potatoes – first early, second early and maincrop. First earlies and second earlies mature the quickest, first earlies around 10 to 12 weeks after planting, with second earlies cropping a couple of weeks later. These are smaller potatoes such as salad varieties and are sold as “new” potatoes in the shops. They don’t store well so you eat them as fresh as possible. Maincrop take longer to grow and you crop them in August. If you are a beginner, I would definitely recommend sticking to earlies as they are much more likely to escape infection from blight, a serious disease that rots the crop.
The beginning of April is a good time to start sowing potatoes. Potatoes are not completely frost hardy, although a good layer of soil usually provides enough protection for the tuber. If you are somewhere coastal with less risk of frost you could plant them a bit earlier in March. If you are somewhere colder, you could start them off in a greenhouse or conservatory and bring them outdoors later on.
I recommend buying seed potatoes from a garden centre or nursery as these will produce bigger and better crops than a shop-bought potato.
Seasoned growers will have sourced their seed potatoes earlier in the year and already chitted them – this means placing them in sunlight, for example a sunny windowsill, to encourage small green shoots. This gives them a bit of a head start but don’t worry if you’re buying seed potatoes this weekend – they can still go straight into the soil without chitting.
You can use a pot, dustbin, bucket or even a sturdy shopping bag as your container but be sure to punch drainage holes in the bottom. Use a mix of multi-purpose compost combined with richer material such as garden compost or well-rotted manure.
Potatoes are greedy and require lots of food and water to grow, so have some liquid feed available to keep them fed while they are developing.
They need space to develop all the tubers so place just one seed potato in a 10-litre sized pot. Fill around a third of the container with the compost and place the potato on top (shoots facing up if it has chitted). Now cover the seed with
another layer of compost but leave room to add more. As green shoots develop over the coming weeks, keep covering with compost until the container is full. Keep watered so it doesn’t dry out.
If you want to get bigger yields in a small space, you can create a “strawberry pot” effect with a taller woven bag. You plant the tubers in layers, cutting holes in the side of the bag to allow the foliage to grow outwards.
If planting in the ground, space seed potatoes around 30cm to 45 cm apart and again make sure the soil is as fertile as possible. Raised beds are a handy “no dig” method of doing this – a thick layer of compost to sow the seeds and then keep earthing up with fresh compost as shoots develop.
Get planting this weekend and by June when the flowers start to open, you will be ready to harvest your crop of gold!