Potato Planting

It might seem early in the year but this week we decided to plant out our potatoes and, upon checking our diary, we were surprised to see we had planted them on exactly the same day last year!

They’ve been on the kitchen windowsill for several weeks where they’ve been slowly chitting and producing nice compact shoots.  We planted them deeply - at a spade’s depth - where they should be well protected from any frosts.  The small raised bed they are in will be easy to protect with a layer or two of fleece when a particularly cold night threatens.

We chose the the first early ‘Caledonian Pearl’, it’s a relatively new variety that has uniform tubers with a waxy flesh and is said to be resistant to potato virus, bruising, splitting, and powdery scab.  The bag we purchased had plenty of tubers, leaving us with enough left over to plant into 12 litre pots where they’ll be grown in the greenhouse to give us an earlier crop.

We have second earlies ‘Charlotte’ and maincrop potatoes ‘Pink Fir Apple’ to follow and will get those planted out over the next few weeks.  We also like to pop a few in one of the compost heap bays where we get a bonus crop of lovely clean skinned potatoes to use later on in the year.