Vegetables - Potatoes

Potatoes are grown from from small potatoes called seed potatoes. That is rather confusing, as they aren't seeds! Any potato left too long over winter will sprout, and could produce a plant and so more potatoes. But proper seed potatoes are guaranteed not to have potato blight. Potato varieties are important, as there is a distinction between Earlies and Maincrop. Maincrop produce ordinary potatoes, which you might buy in shops. Earlies produce new potatoes, which are small, and taste nice! There is also a distinction between floury potatoes and waxy potatoes, and between potatoes suitable for boiling, and those suitable for chips. I buy an early, such as Arran Pilot, and two general purpose Maincrop, usually one red-skinned one, like Desiree. Currently, they seem to be sold in 1kg bags, and I get 2 bags of each variety, so 6 kgs in all. The red skins don't affect the colour of the actual potato inside, but they seem to be good all-rounders. Sometimes I get disease-resistant varieties, because I have a problem with tomato blight, and I distrust the potatoes! (They are related to tomatoes, and they may share disease, but I don't know if this is scientific.) There are also Pink Fir Apples, an odd variety which taste like new potatoes even though they are a main crop (but the potatoes are small).

You get seed potatoes a couple of months before you actually plant them. You should take them out of their container or net, and spread them out. This is to "chit" them. This means allowing small shoots to start appearing. The potatoes will chit anyway, and if they are still in their nets, it is a terrible job to get them out without snapping off the shoots. The potato will produce more shoots, but you have weakened it by removing these first shoots. You spread them out, in the light, to make sure that the shoots are small and green, rather than long and white. You plant them with the shoots, and the potato has a head start to start growing. Chitting should take place in a frost-free area, as potato tubers don't like the frost. I use our spare bedroom floor! (Or if we have visitors, our own bedroom floor...) And I tend to cut open the net, and leave them on it, so I don't get the varieties muddled up. This doesn't so much matter for planting them, but you do want to know which the earlies are when harvesting them. The problem about leaving them in the nets is that the shoots can grow through the nets. So I have to turn the tubers so the shoots are uppermost. Or, if I forget, some cutting away of the net with scissors is required...

Potatoes are traditionally planted out on Good Friday. This happens at different times in different years, and anyway, may not be convenient, or suitable weather. It does give an idea of the time of year, though. So we plant out some time between late March and early April. You can plant Earlies a week or so before Maincrop, but we tend to do them all together. Planting potatoes is quite a business. They need to be planted deep enough, as the roots and new tubers will grow from the seed potato, and any potato tubers showing above ground go green, which is supposed to make them poisonous. There are also quite a few tubers to plant. So we dig a trench one spade deep, and put the potatoes at the bottom, reasonably spaced out - say a foot. We do 2 rows per variety, so 6 rows in all. We've found the quickest way to fill the trench is to rake the pile of earth back into the trench, and we sprinkle fertiliser on the earth before refilling. You can get special potato fertiliser, and we use a 1kg box, but if you can't get that, then a general fertiliser will do. Potatoes are quite "hungry" crops.

Potato plants grow well. They may produce flowers. I nip these off, as they go on to produce fruit, and that takes energy from the plant. Don't eat the fruit! They are poisonous.

You harvest potatoes by digging up the plant and root, with the potatoes fastened to the roots. Try not to put a fork or spade through the potatoes! The earlies are lifted a plant at a time, as you want to eat them. You can start in June, carefully remove some soil to see if the potatoes are big enough to eat. New potatoes are best eaten as soon as possible after digging them up, so don't store them if possible. Maincrop are quite OK to store, but they do grow bigger through the summer. Once the plants have started dying down then you can lift the lot. Let them dry off slightly, and then store in a dark, dry, frost-free place. We store them in our garden shed.

With really fresh earlies, you can just scrap off the skin very easily. Maincrop potatoes have to be peeled with a potato peeler. However, you can bake potatoes in their skins. I wrap them in foil, cut in half with some butter between the halves, which makes the skins softer. My husband cooks them without the foil, with a skewer pushed through. Both nice! The point of the cutting in half, and the skewer, is to shorten the cooking time. Baked potatoes can take an hour at reg 6 (200 deg C), although it depends how big they are.

When you grow potatoes, there are apt to be some small ones, which are a nuisance to peel. I have found that you can slice them thinly and put them in stews, either in the body of the stew or on top. You don't notice the skins then. Probably very good for you as extra roughage!

Seed potatoes in pack