Chitting Potatoes

At the beginning of the month I bought my seed potatoes, and it's that time of year again when the pretty coloured bottles and candles on the bathroom windowsill get packed away...

...to make room to chit my potatoes!

Chitting potatoes makes them develop nice strong shoots so that they start growing faster when you stick them in the ground. Just lay them out in a bright place. Too dark and they'll grow long spindly shoots that break easily, but put them in direct sunlight and the delicate new shoots might shrivel. This north-east facing windowsill is perfect. They get damp whenever someone has a shower, but they dry out again and don't seem to mind. Here's what they look like after nearly three weeks. You can see tiny rolls of new green leaves starting to form, and the little-white-bump beginnings of new roots.

Some people like to debate whether chitting is a good thing to do or a waste of the potatoes' energy which creates a risk of shocking the spuds when you put them in the cold ground. Some major gardening organisations have run tests to see how much difference it made, and found it generally didn't. But I mainly do it because, well, they've gotta go somewhere, right? And I do like to buy them early, so I can get the varieties I want and I'm not left with the shrivelled up manky ones, and it does help to check that they're all healthy and find out which eyes are strongest (I'll plant those facing upwards), and it's good to feel like I'm making a start on the growing season nice and early, even if it is just putting potatoes on a windowsill... I've also read somewhere that chitting stimulates production of solanine in the spuds, which makes them less appealing to any hungry rodents that might eat them after planting, and stops them rotting in the soil. Some people like to sit their seed potatoes in the cups of egg boxes, or even buy special chitting trays, to keep them all neat and tidy with their best eyes standing straight up. I just cram them all together, eyes up-ish - they take up less room that way, they don't mind touching each other and the chits will always grow upwards...

We've grown Kestrel potatoes for a few years now - they seemed to do best on our plot and they taste delicious, especially as mash and roasties. But when we tried Pentland Crown on a quarter of our potato bed last year in the search for a better jacket potato, they did really well too, and suffered much less scab and took longer to soften and sprout in storage, so we decided it was time to branch out and see what we were missing with some more new varieties...

So our maincrop spuds this year are a third King Edward, a third Sante and a third Pentland Crown. We bought them from our local independent garden centre, Aylett Nurseries, where you can select individual tubers and fill a bag for a set price. We got 60 tubers for £3.95! Much better than buying online!

We did buy some seed spuds online too, though. At FoodSmiles last year I was really impressed by a particular first early potato called Accent, which gave huge yields and tasted lovely, so I sought it out and found it at Tuckers Seeds. They arrived last week too, and are chitting on another windowsill. They'll be grown at home, in sacks.

I've also found some leftover seed potatoes from last year which I left in the summer house when we didn't have room for them. I can't remember what they are and I'm not sure I'll grow them, but you can see, even a year after buying them, they're still raring to go, having been kept in the right bright but cool conditions!

Seed Sowing!

At last! The day is here! I've been itching to get starting with this season's seeds since, ooooh, about the second of January, but there's really not much point starting that early and seedlings grown when days are short can end up leggy and weak. Instead, I've taken on board a tip from veg-growing guru Charles Dowding, who advises waiting until there are ten hours of daylight each day before sowing seeds. This happens in mid February, and I've certainly noticed the evenings lengthening these last two weeks so hopefully it will make all the difference.

I like a good clear rule like this - it means no umming and aahing about whether or not it's the right time, no 'well I'll do a few now and a few later and see if there's any difference', no worrying.

Setting myself a clear day to get started - and making it a bit later than perhaps I'd like - has also meant I was far more organised than usual beforehand. I'd cleaned and tested the electric propagator in advance. I'd sorted out all my pots, and I've got a big bag of surplus ready to give away. I'd even written out my plant labels - I usually put the seeds in first then find myself writing labels with grubby fingers while trying to remember which pot's which - not clever!

I've also written up a sowing and planting plan for the whole year, which I'll use to keep records of the dates I actually sow as well. I can see at-a-glance what needs to be sown and where each month, so there'll be no forgetting things or puzzling over when to sow things for winter. I'm sure it'll get tweaked a bit along the way, but you can see it here if you like.

I sow all my seeds in peat-free compost - usually New Horizon organic peat-free. Peat-free seems to have a bad rap in the press - they'll tell you it's not suitable for seed-sowing, or that you have to sieve it and add vermiculite and water more, as if it's somehow more complex or more dangerous - but I've never, ever had any trouble with it; it's really very good stuff. And digging up peat is destructive, unsustainable, and totally unnecessary.

So here they all are. Tucked up in the electric propagator are three sweet peppers (Marconi Rossa, Lipstick and Kaibi Round), three chillies (Ancho Grande, Jalapeno and Big Jim Numex), and one aubergine (Bonica F1). They all need a bit of extra warmth to germinate well, so the electric propagator is really helpful, and I hope to be able to pot them up just in time to sow my tomatoes in the same propagator sometime around mid-March. On the windowsill are cape gooseberries, two pots of leeks (Autumn Giant Porvite and Lyon 2 Prizetaker) and some celeriac (Monarch). I've sown these things first as they are all slow-growing crops that need an early start in order to crop in good time, or to reach a good size.

Hooray! Getting these seeds started is a really good feeling and makes the spring feel that much closer. There's nothing else quite like the promise of big beautiful plants and tasty harvests just from putting a seed in the soil.

The Food Shortage is a Lie

It's easy to be confused by the current opposing issues of world hunger and food waste. We seem to hear them everywhere now: Hundreds of millions of people are going hungry! We need to grow more food for our fast-growing population! 30-50% of food produced is not eaten! Huh?!

But this article - How the Great Food War Will Be Won - clears things up thoroughly, and I'd like to urge everyone to read it.

The fact is, we produce an overabundance of food; the stats show it and the World Bank Institute admits we produce enough, globally, for 14 billion people. This isn't exactly new news; I've argued before that we could already produce more than enough food for the global population. But yet industrial agriculture and its supporters - from the UK's National Farmers Union to CropLife International to, of course, Syngenta, Bayer and Monsanto - want us to believe we do not - perhaps cannot - produce enough. The article points out;

The strategic centrepiece of Monsanto’s PR, and also that of just about every major commercial participant in the industrialised food system, is to focus on the promotion of one single overarching idea. The big idea that industrial producers in the food system want you to believe is that only they can produce enough for the future population.

It's a lie. An industry lie, to promote industrial agriculture over small-scale agroecological growing. An industry lie to make money, at great cost to the earth.

...in every single case where industrial agriculture is implemented it leaves landscapes progressively emptier of life. Eventually, the soil turns either into mud that washes into the rivers or into dust that blows away on the wind. Industrial agriculture has no long term future; it is ecological suicide. 

The article goes on to describe how the ecological food movement needs a new strategy; one that involves dismantling this lie and changing perception. Do give it a read:

How the Great Food War Will Be Won

An Exception

I've always tried to avoid growing F1 hybrids - well, mostly. If I'm sent free seeds with an order or magazine it seems rather churlish to reject them, and a few others have slipped through the net over the years for one reason or another. It's not that there's anything 'wrong' with hybrids, but you have to support the things that you want to thrive. It's a bit like buying British or local. I want to see biodiversity and food security thriving, and hybrids undermine these by drastically reducing demand for traditional open-pollinated varieties, and because they're not genetically stable and can't reproduce to create another generation the same. I also like to think I can save the seeds of all my crops, although my seed-saving operation has a long way to go yet... And F1 seeds can be pretty expensive too!

But this year I'm making one deliberate exception, and it's this:

Aubergines are a luxury vegetable for us - something that we could easily do without, but something I'd love to eat more. I rarely buy them, simply because I'm buying less and less veg anyway - my priority is to eat what I grow and I'm far too busy eating all the courgettes and French beans and tomatoes and peppers and leafy greens coming out of the garden when they're in season. So the only way I'm gonna get to eat them is if I grow them myself!

But aubergines, lets face it, are just not really suited to the British climate - they need lots and lots of warmth and sunshine - yet I know many gardeners have moderate success with them, especially under cover. Not me; I've managed to grow just two small aubergines in five or six years of trying, and one of them went bad on the plant. There are only really two open-pollinated varieties of aubergines widely available (not counting fancy-coloured ones or mini ones, which I'm less interested in for now) and I've tried them both, without success. So when I read a recommendation for this variety, Bonica F1, on Nicky Kyle's great blog I thought well, why not have one last bash? Better to grow an F1 hybrid than not to grow them at all! Hybridisation brings the best traits together from other varieties to create new varieties that are (generally) more productive or earlier, more consistent and more reliable - the easier (though pricier) choice for any gardener, and in theory they will crop more readily where traditional varieties have failed. The plastic greenhouse we're putting on the allotment this year means we'll be able to provide them with a bit more protection than at home, too, so I'm crossing my fingers and looking forward to a bountiful aubergine harvest for once!

Patience...

Despite having a long list of jobs I need to get done before the growing season starts again, very little is happening on the plot at the moment; a week or two of bitterly cold and wet weather has made digging unpleasant at best and impossible at worst. I wouldn't mind so much if it would just snow properly, like it has in much of the country, and make the place look pretty for a while! But all we've had is yucky icy sleet and lots of rain.

I've also been very busy with preparations for our first FoodSmiles AGM last week, and the FoodSmiles seed order this week! If you think figuring out what to grow on your own allotment can take a while, try figuring out what you need for a giant veg plot for 25 families using strictly organic seed only!

There's still plenty to harvest from the allotment and this week we brought home these carrots, leeks, parsnips and the last two (very small!) swedes.

We have made some progress on what is to be our new 'alternative' fruit patch, shown above. It's always been a tough corner of the allotment, this, and the couchgrass has really colonised it again, so we've dug it over once and we're halfway through a second go to pick out remaining roots. I was hoping to finish it off tomorrow and start planting it up, but if the weather is as cold as forecast I won't even be able to get a fork in the ground, and we'll have to settle for a trip to the garden centre instead - I think I have finally sated my seed-buying urge now, but there are still seed potatoes and compost to buy. Now it's February I'll be counting down the days to sowing my first seeds in the middle of the month... Better get the propagator out and clean up some pots!