What you need
Seed potatoes
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A cool and light place for storage
A garden centre
IN MY last column, I suggested growing blackcurrants, one of the easiest fruits to cultivate. Their vegetable counterpart in terms of difficulty level is the humble spud, and now is the right time to start planning your potato crop.
Unglamorous as they are, potatoes may not be everyone鈥檚 first choice for home growing. But they taste noticeably better than shop-bought ones, especially when growing baby salad potatoes, and produce a harvest just a few months after planting. Because they can be so productive with regard to calories harvested, some historians say that the in the 16th century helped fuel the continent鈥檚 population growth.
When I took on my allotment and didn鈥檛 know where to start, old hands told me to put potatoes in the first strip of cleared earth because I could virtually forget about them until summer, when they would produce my first harvest. But you can also grow potatoes in the smallest of backyards, as they do very well in pots. Using containers also helps keep slugs away and takes less digging at harvest time.
Although potatoes aren鈥檛 planted until March or April in the UK, once the risk of snow and frost has passed, it is time to buy your 鈥渟eed potatoes鈥�, small, disease-free spuds from last year鈥檚 harvest. You can get a head start on the growing season by storing seed potatoes in a cool and light place for a month or two, encouraging them to send out a few shoots. Called 鈥渃hitting鈥�, this is typically done by placing the potatoes in egg cartons to hold them upright and exposed to the light. 鈥淭hey think it鈥檚 time to get going,鈥� says Derek Stewart at the James Hutton Institute in Dundee, UK.
There is great debate about whether chitting is worth the bother, with studies giving mixed results on whether it boosts the crop. According to one UK trial, chitting does lead to a slightly bigger yield, but does so by making plants produce fewer yet bigger spuds. If your goal is lots of small potatoes, then chitting would be unhelpful. On the other hand, larger potatoes take less time to wash, and having to scrub off clods of earth is the one downside of growing your own. Big spuds are also easier to find when you are digging them up.
If you choose not to chit, I would still buy your seed potatoes now because, by March, garden centres may be running low on stock and some varieties will be sold out. Just store the bag somewhere cold so they don鈥檛 start sprouting shoots.
For years, I have been growing a variety called Charlotte, which is good for slug-resistance, but I am probably stuck in a potato rut. This year, I will be adding a row of Mayan Gold, said to be unsurpassed for flavour. I plan to experiment by chitting half of each kind and comparing the results 鈥� why don鈥檛 you run a field trial of your own?
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