Tater Time

We've had some early potatoes growing in sacks in the garden for a few weeks now - I've been gradually filling the sacks to cover the growing shoots and protect them from frost, and we should have our first new potatoes by the end of the month. I've made three successional sowings, three weeks apart, to spread the harvest out.

But we've only just planted our maincrop potatoes on the allotment. As with seed-sowing, when I was new to growing I used to be anxious to get this job done as soon as we hit March, but these days I take a more relaxed attitude; it takes about two weeks for potato shoots to appear so they'll be arriving in mid-May and I suspect they'll be safe from frost by then.

Our three chosen varieties - Pentland Crown, King Edward and Sante - have been chitting on the bathroom windowsill for a good long time now, and all have healthy chits which should get them off to a good start. They have a full bed to themselves in our crop rotation - space for about 60 plants - and had we to remove a few forgotten carrots and parsnips, as well as quite a lot of dead nettle and chickweed, to clear the area. Then we raked some home-made compost over the whole lot, divided the bed into three, laid out the seed spuds in two double rows, and used trowels to plant them all 4-5 inches deep.

I'll be sure to hoe this bed over the next couple of weeks to get rid of any new weeds, and then in a few weeks time when all the shoots are up we'll earth them up, but otherwise we'll just leave the spuds to do their thing now until they die off again in August or September. Easy-peasy - just the way I like it :-)