After I took the Christmas decorations to the shed this morning - always a tinge of sadness - I stopped off at the greenhouse to harvest the last of our Christmas potatoes.
I love the snow we're having this week, but it does rather put paid to gardening. Harsh weather has made me all the more thankful for my lovely greenhouse - the only thing that's tempting me to the bottom of the garden at the moment. After I took the Christmas decorations to the shed this morning - always a tinge of sadness - I stopped off at the greenhouse to harvest the last of our Christmas potatoes.
We planted a variety of spuds in pots and compost sacks when we got back from holiday at the beginning of September (these are especially chilled seed potatoes for autumn planting). When growing potatoes in containers it's a good idea to add some granular organic feed at planting time, since most composts only contain enough nutrients for around a month. When the frosts came the potatoes were moved into the greenhouse for protection. This year, the best of the crop by far - and one of my favourite potatoes, was 'Red Duke of York'. I'll certainly be repeating the experiment again next year in an attempt to grow as much of my Christmas dinner as I can.
Some large garden centres are already selling their new season of seed potatoes, but I usually like to wait a little and get together with friends so that we can coordinate what to buy. 2kg is a standard bag, but that's a lot of potatoes to plant if you only have a small amount of space. Some allotment shops buy in seed potatoes then break up the packs so that you can buy smaller amounts. Similarly, potato fairs like the one held at Garden Organic in Coventry every year are well worth visiting. You can chat to experts and also buy a wide variety in the quantities you require.
A few years ago I conducted an experiment on the allotment after talking to Alan Romans, the potato guru. He reckoned that potatoes don't have to be chitted to grow well and should actually be planted without the buds having appeared. So, I planted one lot of chitted potatoes and had planted another group of unchitted potatoes planted at the same time. It didn't seem to make a huge difference to the yield (the unchitted lot just matured a little later), but in the following year I experimented with getting larger potatoes. With one group I left the chitted buds as they were, with the other I put a collar made of newspaper around each one so that only the top bud could develop. Planting with just one or two buds certainly makes a difference to the size of potatoes you harvest.
My family tends to prefer more conventional varieties like 'Maris Piper' and 'Pentland Javelin', but I always sneak in a few 'fancy' varieties. This year we are trialling 'Blue Danube' for the first time (also known as Adam Blue). The skin on this early maincrop is dark, purplish, blue as the name suggests, but the flesh is white by contrast. Blue skinned varieties are great for bringing a bit of glamour to the dinner plate -they make striking looking oven chips or potato wedges: leave the skin on and cut to the desired shape then dry off in a tea-towel before cooking. Spread them on a baking tray with some olive oil (not the green virgin kind, the yellowy kind of mild oil) then sprinkle with salt.
What's your favourite potato variety?
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