It’s the spud life
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!
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They are greedy so require lots of food and water to develop