It’s time to plant potato tubers in the garden for an early crop.
It’s the Easter weekend, and so it is time to plant out my first early potatoes. These are such a great crop for improving a new bed, which my vegetable patch is, and there is nothing, nothing, like a proper fresh new potato. Really, they are very hard to beat.
I bought these at the RHS potato fair from the wonderful (and dangerous, bank balance-wise) Pennard Plants. As I handed them over for payment, the cheerful man who has for the past five years or so of me rocking up to these fairs seemed rather amused by quite how many packs of seed I manage to buy from him pointed out that I’d jumbled seven different potatoes into one paper bag. How would I know what they were?
Well, I made it rather more difficult for myself by then losing the paper bag when I got home, so all I know is that most of them are earlies, bar two. But beyond that, I can only remember a couple of their names.
‘Anya’ is very easily recognisable, with its knobbly long shape. I’ve got two of them. And two ‘Vitelotte’ tubers: a lovely purple cultivar. Then there is a ‘Vales Emerald’, a ‘Blue Danube’ (which is a maincrop), and ‘Rudolph’ (also maincrop).
All of them have been chitting away on a windowsill since I bought them, and now is the time for the earlies to go in.
The chitting process speeds up the potato’s growth once it is in the ground, which means you get the earlies earlier. I’ve also had the potato patch covered with black plastic and black weed matting for the past few weeks to warm up the soil before planting.
I dug that soil into shallow trenches (I am trying to avoid digging this soil as much as possible, instead adding organic matter to the top as it is basically sub soil churned up by the digger that was used to landscape the garden), and laid the potatoes 12 inches apart in the trenches, each with a young comfrey leaf under it to give it a bit of early feed as it gets going.
I’ll do the maincrop potatoes in a few weeks’ time. As soon as the leaves emerge through the soil, I’ll breathe a sigh of relief as I’m always convinced the potatoes have been eaten by some horrible underground beast until they pop up. Then when the stems reach about 9 inches, I’ll start earthing them up with fresh compost. The benefit of using compost is that it enriches the soil for the next crop, which will be sweetcorn and tomatoes. And my soil needs all the enrichment it can get.
This time of year is always exciting as there is so much potential in all the seeds and tubers that are going into the ground. But I’m particularly excited about planting out my potatoes because I haven’t grown any since 2009. Even though I had an allotment for three years, for some reason I never got round to growing pots, even though they would have taken up a good amount of space on the plot. Perhaps the reason was that particularly towards the end, I didn’t have the time or the right life to manage an allotment as well as I could have done. The garden is big, but it is manageable because I can pop out for half an hour at the end of a day in the summer, or do a long day of gardening broken up with lunch, coffee and toilet breaks. That’s not possible with an allotment that’s four miles away, and even less possible when you work in the City as I do. So there’s something really rather satisfying this year about feeling completely on top of the garden, rather than desperately lagging behind. Especially if it means I’ve got my act together sufficiently to grow potatoes again.
