Potatoes straight from the ground are beautiful. With a little freshly picked mint and sometimes with a little butter you will rarely taste anything more wonderful. If you can serve them up with a few carrots and freshly podded peas, you could want for nothing more.

As for breaking up the ground - potatoes don’t break up the ground - you do; digging in manure, digging trenches, and hoeing them up. However all this exercise produces some lovely vegetables.

I never water my potatoes and get some fairly big ones. The RHS did some research a few years back and found that watering vegetables did increase their weight and size. If you can I would water them at least twice a week, however this depends on how many you have. It would be impractical for me to water because I have so many. We cannot use hoses or sprinklers.

I have rubbed off all the eyes in past years and got a really good crop. I only do it if the shoots become drawn - I left my seed potatoes in the dark one year and they produced long white stems. I have also reduced the number of eyes to two or three in the past. I think that this helps to produce larger spuds but that might just be me whishfully thinking. I wouldn’t rub them off if they are the small,dark green ones.
I always put my late potatoes in before my earlies . That way they get a good long maturing period. I try to plant when there is less chance of frost. Early April maybe.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 12:35 pm and is filed under potatoes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.