The Secret to Perfect Early Potatoes – Start Planting Now

Spring is the time when I really like to get going on my veg patch, the kitchen garden. One of the stalwarts here is potatoes and if your garden's small, stick with me because I've got a neat way where you can grow potatoes even if your space is limited. Now don't just pull out those old spuds from underneath the kitchen sink. You want to buy new seed potatoes. They come in packs like this and they're called seed potatoes because they've been grown probably in colder parts of the country where insect damage from pests like aphids is much reduced. Therefore they don't carry virus diseases. Virus diseases reduce yield and anything from under the sink is probably a bit tired anyway. So spend a bit of money on seed potatoes that are healthy and they'll give you a far better crop. Now there are 10 seed potatoes in each of these. This will do a row about 10 feet across because you generally plant them about a foot apart. You'll see on here it says Charlotte, one of my favorite varieties, really tasty potato, second early. Now there are first earlies which are the quickest to mature, second earlies like Charlotte which happens to be my favorite variety and I'm not bothered about a week or two and then main crop which take longer and they're bigger spuds. But in terms of a small veg patch, main crop potatoes are so cheap in the shops that it's hardly worth growing them. It's the new potatoes that we love isn't it and the first and second earlies will give you new potatoes. That first picking and the thrill when you put the fork in and you prise up, is there anything there? And then when there is, oh you can get it from the garden to the plate within a space of about 20 minutes. My goodness me they taste good. You could plant them straight into the ground from the packet but if you want a slightly earlier crop and a slightly heavier one too, there's a little trick you need to do. You put them either in egg boxes or an old wooden box like this, in a window in the light and you get them to sprout a bit and by having these little sprouts growing, I stack these potatoes eye ends uppermost, the eyes are the buds and they're on one end of the spud and you'll find that end, there's a little kind of sort of umbilical cord on the other end where it was attached to its mum's root. Too much information Alan. But there you are, once you've got them sprouted like this, about half an inch to an inch long, that's when they're ready to plant. So this is my kitchen garden. Three main beds with a small asparagus bed there because I like asparagus, my wife doesn't. So in this one I'm going to put the potatoes and I reckon I can get about five rows in here. We're not self-sufficient but we grow enough to last us right to the following spring. I'm still eating potatoes at the moment that I grew last year. I've spread a taut line from one end to the other and I'm now going to take out a trench with a spade to a depth of about six inches. I'm just using the spade here to take out, it's almost a slit trench, it doesn't need to be terribly wide. About 15 centimetres, six inches deep and this soil is fairly rich already. It's had quite a bit of manure over the years or garden compost to be honest rather than manure so it's in really good heart. You can see how dark it is, generally the darkness of soil is an indicator of its fertility, the darker the better. So if you're planting on soil that hasn't grown vegetables before and generally speaking in the garden the veg patch is about the richest piece of earth or it should be, if it's virgin earth it's always worth working some organic matter in. And some fertiliser as well but here in soil which has been well enriched and well fertilised over the years all I'm going to do in the bottom of this trench now is to put a small layer of well-rotted farmyard soil improver in the bottom, it just gives them a head start. I'm spacing these tubers just about a foot apart, maybe a little bit less. So there we are, eyes uppermost, you can see the little shoots sitting on the top, it's rather like tucking children into bed on top of this compost and then simply a matter of pulling back the earth over the top. And you can see there's a slight ridge appearing here which will be magnified when I pull a bit over from this side of the row as well and it will make a small ridge which marks the row, shows me where it is. But more than that, when the potato shoots start to grow and the new tubers start forming under the soil this ridge will prevent them from being exposed to the light. Tubers of potatoes that are exposed to light turn green, green potatoes are poisonous so if you ever get a spot and half of it's green, don't eat that half, cut it off and eat the other half that isn't. There's a great sense of excitement in making your first ridge of spuds at the beginning of the year in spring because it's such a time of promise and you think, oh, you know, sometime in July and gardeners need patience. One of the delights of gardening is what a monastic friend of mine calls the postponement of gratification, anticipation, waiting for something to come into season. We're such an instant society now, you know, I want my strawberries, I want them now in February. Wait, you'll enjoy the taste and they'll be that much more flavoursome if you wait until June. As soon as these little green shoots start to come through the soil, keep an eye on the weather because if frost is threatened, come out with your spade, throw up a bit more earth to cover that fresh green growth that's coming up. That'll help protect it from frost and then certainly from the end of May onwards, there should be no danger of frost and you can just keep gently earthing up to make sure the spuds underneath don't get a glimpse of the sunlight that you will hopefully be enjoying. But supposing you haven't got a veg patch and you still want potatoes, you can have them. I really don't think that a lack of space should preclude you from having your own new potatoes. So if you can find these potato bags, you can use a sock and grate pot if you want, but these bags that are specifically designed to grow potatoes in are really very useful. They've got plenty of drainage holes in the base so when the rain does come down or you get a deluge, the excess moisture can go away and stop the potatoes from rotting. Roll the top down to make it about half as deep as it really is. The reason I'm doing this is because as your potato shoots grow, the equivalent of earthing up is pulling up the sides of the bag and adding more compost. For now, you can fill this to about half its own depth. Push it down so there are no air pockets. Not quite there yet. So you can see I've got there, what, about 12 centimetres deep of peat-free, multi-purpose compost. Take your seed potatoes. These are our lovely shallots and I reckon I can get five in here. So I'm looking for ones with nice eyes Four, five and then just put them in so they're about five centimetres, a couple of inches. Four around the edge and one in the middle. Last one. So I'll water these in now, stand them here on the hard standing and as those shoots come up, a bit more compost going in and if it's still a little bit frosty I'll be covering the shoots up so they're not frosted by the chilly weather and then when danger of frost is past, the bag will be fully open to the top, there'll be a good depth of compost and hopefully when I come to knock this bag out in July, it'll be full of new potatoes and no veg pouch underneath them, just a bit of paving, just shows you can still grow new potatoes even if you don't have a garden. I'll be posting new videos each week so subscribe to the channel below and let's get gardening together.