Planting Potatoes

I am finally well enough to garden again, after 3 long weeks of being housebound and worrying I'd miss the entire spring, so today was an absolutely exhausting catch up day in the garden, which mostly focused on planting the potatoes.

As I said in my most recent post, the potatoes have been chitting (growing "eyes") on our windowsill for a week or two now.  I know some people start them off in the dark, perhaps planting potatoes that have sprouted in the cupboard, but I find the long, pale shoots that come off those potatoes to be weak and snap off easily. We start ours on the windowsill and the shoots grown green and strong, and not as long as shoots that have been searching for light.

We tried growing potatoes in bags last year,  but I honestly forgot all about them come harvest time because they were tucked away under the fuscia. I also had a lot more seed potatoes this year, and not very many suitable bags or containers, so I decided to grow them in the ground this year instead. It is more labour intensive and takes up more space but I'm hoping that will mean much higher yields.

First step was to dig a trench. This took us a couple of days (because we had all been poorly and didn't want to overdo things), and looked suspiciously like we were digging a grave.

We stripped the turf and laid it upside down next to the bed. It'll rot down over the season and turn into lovely rich loam,  which the worms will love. Then we dug using a fork to loosen the soil and a shovel to hoof the newly loosened soil into a pile next to the trench. I won't lie - it was hard work. Probably really good for your abs, but we spread it over a few days so we would be able to walk when we were done.

Once we had the trench a good spade and a half to two spade depths deep, I chucked some cut grass in the bottom of it. Potatoes are greedy, they like plenty of nutrients, and as that breaks down it will feed the plants from the bottom up. Because potatoes are so greedy, I also added as much of my home made banana peel fertiliser as I had in the house, as a slower release fertiliser.

After my grass and banana peel mix was added, I put a small amount of shop bought compost down. Really didn't use very much - the bag you can see in the first picture is a 20L bag.  I used all of it for the potatoes, using around a quarter of it (so approx 5L) for this stage. 

Then I laid my seed potatoes, with the little eyes pointing upwards, on top of the compost. Some people cut their seed potatoes in half and leave them to heal for a couple of days before planting, especially if they are large and have plenty of shoots /eyes growing. I didn't do that, because I had plenty of seed potatoes for my space (in fact, I've probably planted them a bit too close together).

Once I had all my seed potatoes in the trench, I covered them over with a handful of compost each, then covered the whole bed with just a little bit of the soil I had dug up to make the trench, and kept in a heap next to it.

As you can see in the above picture, the trench is far from full; there's only just enough topsoil there to cover the seed potatoes up. 

As the potato plants grow and their green leaves start to pop up, they will need to be "earthed up" -ie covered in soil - a few times to encourage them to make tubers. So at this point I took what was left of my small bag of compost - about half of it - and mixed it with the heap of topsoil I have next to the potato trench. 

As the potato plants grow, I'll keep scooping the topsoil/compost mix over them until I can't pile it any higher. Then it'll just be a case of allowing them to do their thing until harvest time. We'll see how it goes.

I got loads more done in the garden today, including making a sort of fence to keep the dog out of my veggies (he never digs where I want him to), planting lots of beneficial and edible flowers, and tending my upcycled bookcase and bed to bed beds, but I'm too tired from doing all of that today to write a post on them right now, so I'll come back and link to them in the next few days.

If you have any top tips for planting potatoes, let me know about them in the comments section. Happy growing!