Potatoes 2 - Helen is good at digging

Today, Helen planted the B&Q potatoes. They hadn’t chitted a lot as we had bought them a bit late, and seen as they were earlies, we thought we had better get them in! I heard somewhere that you should “plant your lates in early and your earlies in late”, so at least we’re doing it right (even if it was an accident!!). I must say that Helen did a stirling job, digging a tough area, in much straighter lines than I could have. We’ll have to see which one’s come up first. The QD ones were chitted, but were a low price pack, however the B&Q ones are more expensive, but will also have to fight their way to the daylight, as well as the fact they haven’t been chitted!

Potatoes!

Today we planted our potatoes! We got the potatoes from QD, our local discount shop, they are maincrop Maris Bard (I think). Helen took charge of chitting the potatoes at her flat on the window sill and it worked really well. Each potato had quite a number of ‘chits’ on them – we placed them on eggboxes and loo rolls in Helen’s front room, so she could keep an eye on them!

We also have a plan for some B&Q seed potatoes we bought. I have no idea which type they were, all I know is that they were earlies! A colleague mentioned that potatoes are very good for digging up the earth for you. Therefore, you don’t necessarily need to double dig the area you are using. We have decided to use an area we haven’t even dug yet, dig a trench to plant them and let them do all the hard work! It’s an experiment, but we will let you know how it goes.