Main sowing of potatoes

You may remember that we sowed some early potatoes back at the end of January. We are hoping to harvest these mid-late May, but in order to do so they have had to be grown on for most of their lives indoors to protect them from the cold weather and frosts.

However, we also wanted to grow some a bit later in the season, so planted Cara and Carolus last weekend. We haven’t grown either of these before, but they took our fancy in the garden centre a couple of months back!

We planted these up exactly the same as we did for the earlier planting, recapped below for ease of reference.

We mixed up some compost as follows:

• 4 x 3 1/2 gallon buckets of medium grade peat
• 10oz calcified seaweed
• 16oz Q4

We then filled each pot to a third full, and placed a tuber in each pot before filling to the top with the remaining compost.

Exactly as before, we thinned down the number of shoots left on each potato tuber before planting to one. The idea behind this is to cut down the number of roots and therefore get larger potatoes. We’ll see what happens when we turn them out in a couple of months’ time!

You can just knock the shoots off if you prefer, but we find digging them out completely either with your fingernail or a penknife to work the best. Otherwise, you run the risk of the potato re-shooting where you just rub off the excess shoots.

Once planted up, we gave the pots a good watering and these have been placed outside.