Category: Potatoes

Dare I plant my potatoes this early?

21/2/2015

Bill is famous for doing everything two weeks before the books say. He usually gets away with it, and often has the earliest crops on the site. Whatever the books say, if you fancy getting your seed potatoes in during the last week in February, the risk may well pay off.

Kent does get late frosts - however they are rarer here than, say, in the Midlands or East Anglia, so the risk is less. Have some sacking, old newspaper, net curtains - whatever, although I should remind you that the Trading Store sells Crop Protection fleece very cheap! - ready as the leaves emerge, and keep your eye on the weather forecast. A light covering is all it needs to protect young leaves from scorching. Even a 'ground frost' later in spring, which may blacken the tips of the leaves, does not do any serious damage.

You do not need to 'chit' seed potatoes before planting. We lay seed potatoes out in a light, frost-fee place so they don't produce long fragile shoots in the interval between buying them and planting them. Chitting doesn't speed up the crop and you can plant seed potatoes straight away without doing it.

For more on growing potatoes locally click here to go to our advice page.

0 Comments

Blight on late-planted potatoes

20/9/2014

0 Comments

If you have planted your potatoes in spring, no doubt they are all lifted and stored by now. There is no advantage in leaving them in the ground a minute after the haulm has died down, as it only leaves them vulnerable to slug attack.

If you have planted potatoes late because you have recently taken on your plot, or if you are trying out planting late summer for new potatoes in the autumn, you need to be aware that there is a very great deal of blight around right now, and the humid warm conditions mean it will spread quickly.

Potato blight also affects outdoor tomatoes. It is worth taking extra care not to allow blight to infest your plot from year to year. You can protect potatoes, as well as tomatoes, from blight by spraying with Bordeaux mixture.

Click here for a particularly clear article on potato blight.

For more about Bordeaux mixture click here.

For our own page on growing potatoes click here

0 Comments

Look out for potato blight!

15/7/2014

0 Comments

Blight on a tomato.

Spells of warm, humid weather mean blight. Blight is a fungus disease, spread by rain and wind, affecting both potatoes and tomatoes. The first signs are small patches of brown on the foliage, with the damaged areas drying and shrinking. Click on the pic (left) to go to the RHS advice page.

Blight can be prevented by spraying with Bordeaux Mixture - a post which said Bordeaux mixture was to be withdrawn, on this page, was MISTAKEN - your website compiler was reading info on the RHS website wrong. There have been a number of attempts to withdraw Bordeaux mixture over the years but it is still currently available. If you spray with Bordeaux mixture you will need to re-apply it after rain!

On tomatoes, pick off any affected leaves and burn or bin them (don't compost diseased material), spraying with bordeaux mixture to stop it spreading. Tomatoes in greenhouses, protected from the rain, are less vulnerable.

If your potatoes have already formed a decent crop - and I don't know about you, but my 'first earlies' are the size of maincrop, while my 'second earlies' rival some of the smaller moons of Jupiter - then you can simply cut off all the foliage and bin it. Thus will stop the blight migrating down to the spuds and you can lift them in your own time.

If there is any suggestion that blight might be about, store your potatoes in hessian sacks rather than paper. If you don't have a nice dark cellar (how many of us have one of those?) Then use the sacks double to keep out the light.

0 Comments

Still time for spuds

19/4/2014

0 Comments

It has been an unusually early spring, and that has caught gardeners on the hop. However, the weather we're having right now is pretty much normal for April - except we'd like some more of those April showers, please.

In the old cottage gardens, potatoes were traditionally planted on Good Friday. Why, when Easter is in a different place each year, and the weather is to variable? Why - because it was one of the few days the agricultural labourer could rely on having as a day off!!!

Another old way of deciding planting times was to say you could put the potatoes in when you could sit on the ground with your trousers down. Not a technique we'd recommend in the relatively public space of the allotments - although, curiously, not unrelated to the navigational techniques of the Polynesian islanders! However, it is clearly a way of testing soil temperature - much more important for spuds than the air temperature.

You can take a modern approach and buy a cheap soil thermometer. Plant and sow when the soil temperature two inches down (about 5cm) is 5degC or above. Particularly important when sowing parsnips, which hate a cold soil!

Spuds put in now will be a little later but you've still time to get a really good crop. 'Early' varieties aren't especially hardy, they're just quick to mature - so put them in now and you'll be eating the results before you know it.

0 Comments

Spring is busting out all over!

13/3/2014

0 Comments

March is always a mad panic, and always, always, we have that moment when we suddenly realise we forgot something vital. Like planting fruit bushes, or chitting the seed potatoes.
The good news is it's amazing what you can get away with in terms of catching up.

Though fruit bushes are already sending out leaves, you can still get away with planting them if you're prepared to give them plenty of water in dry weather. If you're strictly a weekend allotmenteer, accept that it is wise to wait and plant in October. You can help get fruitbushes off to a good start, however, by planting with "rootgrow". Helpfully, this is currently on a half-price offer at Hamstreet Garden Centre till the 18th. "Rootgrow" supplies the beneficial mycorrhizal fungi that make the difference between a weedy plant and a vigorous one. You have to use it when planting and cannot add it later.

Click here to go to information about 'rootgrow' and how it works

As far as chitting seed potatoes goes, a study by the RHS found it makes very little difference to the time your spuds crop or the amount they yield. You don't imagine commercial growers lovingly chit them then carefully plant the fragile chitted seed potatoes, do you? If you're late getting away, just plant them as they are, don't wait to chit them!

0 Comments

Dare I plant my potatoes this early?

Blight on late-planted potatoes

Look out for potato blight!

Still time for spuds

Spring is busting out all over!

Kent's climate is drier, hotter and has a longer growing season than the average for the UK. Advice in gardening books may not fit Kent. This blog has local tips on what will grow and when to do garden jobs.

Archives

Categories