One potato, two potatoes...

When I said I enjoyed growing food I suppose what I really meant was that I enjoy the way food grows itself.  When I grew a lot of flowers I always favoured natural looking gardens in the Gertrude Jekyll style, but if I’m honest that is at least partly because I have a limited tolerance for continual weeding, trimming and dead-heading etc.  So it is with vegetables.  I am unlikely to start growing leeks anytime soon.  All that transplanting, hoeing and earthing-up sounds too much like hard work.  Potatoes on the other hand are my kind of crop. 

It was late in the season when I arrived back in this country in mid April, and frankly I would not have thought about growing much in the way of vegetables had I not been given a bag of seed potatoes by a friend’s dad.  This bag, which was surplus to requirements in his own garden, was not entirely promising.  All the potatoes were sprouting vigourously and the skins were soft and wrinkled.  By the time I had let them lie around in my kitchen for a couple of weeks they were even worse.

Nevertheless I didn’t want to look ungrateful, so eventually I prepared some ground and got around to planting the seed potatoes, more in hope than expectation.  First I cut off all the shoots leaving only one on each potato. Then I planted them with the remaining shoot facing upwards, in rows about 18 inches apart.  The only other thing I did for them was to keep them watered during the driest weeks of the summer.

After about 10 days they started to show above ground. Fourteen spuds came out of that bag and all fourteen plants came up.  After 8 weeks they flowered.  This is the point at which the tubers really start to swell and ideally you should start administering a liquid feed. I didn't have any available and my nearest garden centre is about 12 miles away, so I didn't bother. You can start to harvest the potatoes from this point on, but they do continue to grow for some weeks depending on conditions. I generally wait until the leaves begin to turn yellow.

The only reason to lift potatoes is if you are worried about slugs or disease.  My soil is exceptionally quick draining alluvial sand.  Digging is a joy and slugs are not a problem, so I left them underground for a couple more weeks. I finally harvested them yesterday.

Simply stick a garden fork in to the ground a few inches to the side of the plant and prise the soil and the plant up and over to reveal the potatoes lying in the loose earth.  It still seems like magic to see beautifully formed potatoes lying where there were none a few weeks before.  Make sure you get all of the tubers out, even small ones, or they will rot and may encourage blight which would infect future plantings.  I used to get the children to rummage in the earth looking for them.  Their excitement at upturning a straggler was every bit as intense as my own when I was their age and helped my own father on his allotment.

I think my potatoes are Cara, which is a popular maincrop variety noted for being blight resistant and storing well.  I have grown them before.  They are a very versatile potato tending towards the waxy end of the spectrum and with a rich savoury taste.  I harvested 10lbs which is a decent return from my 14 seeds considering I didn't feed them.  I put them in a hessian sack in the garage where they will be both dark and cool and they should last me well in to the autumn and maybe beyond.

Now I’m not suggesting that this is the best way to grow potatoes. I am led to believe that I may have been quite lucky in avoiding pests or disease, and perhaps by feeding and earthing-up I could have improved the crop, but it does show how you should never let ignorance or fear put you off getting stuck in to the garden. After all, what’s the worst thing that can happen?