Potatoes Part 2 – Planting out

If, like me, you started chitting your potatoes last month (potatoes part 1), then your seed potatoes are probably starting to look a little bit ugly, all wrinkled with alien like sprouts. If you haven’t got started yet then it isn’t too late, you may have missed the boat for Christmas dinner but you’ll still have a lovely crop later in the summer.

Wrinkly Alien seed potatoes

So the wrinkled alien sprout stage (about 1cm long sprouts) means they are ready for planting, mine took ages to sprout for some reason but they were finally ready to go and I managed to find space for them all in the patch and in a couple of containers. The method for planting is similar for both containers and planting in soil in that you need to be able to put more soil on top when the plants start to send up leaves. So for containers the easy way is just to fill the container up half full and leave space for topping up, for planting in the ground you can dig a trench (about 10 – 20 cm deep) to plant the potatoes, cover them with soil and then mound more soil over as needed.  Plant the potatoes about 20 to 30 cms apart. 

In the container

The idea is that by covering up the leaves you encourage more underground potato growth rather than useless leafy growth. So for the first four or five weeks when you see the leaves starting to come through push some dirt over the plant until covered with a loose pile of soil, you will gradually fill in the trench and have a little long narrow hillock or you will gradually fill up your container.

I'm sure this trench was straighter than it looks in the photo!

After four to five weeks of creating your hill, leave the plants to grow and keep well watered. It’s worth buying some potato food and feeding periodically according to packet instructions. And that is all you can do until around Christmas time for new potato varieties or about March for the regular potatoes. The beauty is that you can just fiddle around under the plant to find a couple of potatoes as you need them, you don’t need to dig the whole plant up. Just cover up the rest to keep growing. The longer you leave the plants the bigger the potatoes will be.
 

It’s a great cycle, by the time you are sick of new potatoes or potato salad you will be getting potatoes big enough for roasting or mashing, by the time you are sick of roast or mash they are big enough for jackets or chipping, and by the time you are sick of potatoes in general you’ll have eaten them all and you can have a break!  I’m going to have a go at pre-cooking potatoes for the freezer this year, anyone got any recommendations?
 

The sun is shining today and it is making me think about barbeques so I’ll leave you with my potato salad recipe that goes great with a summer barbeque. It might be a few months away before I can make this with my own potatoes but maybe I can cheat and buy some when I see the first new potatoes appearing in the supermarket.
 

 

The best potato salad:

I have to admit I don't normally follow a recipe and I just put things in a bowl until it looks about right but I've tried to recreate it here ... feel free to amend to suit!  This will serve around 8 people as a side for a bbq

 

- 500g new potatoes scubbed but not peeled, if they are large new pots then cut in half

- 3 generous spoonfuls of light mayonnaise (you can use the non-light versions, I just normally already have the light stuff in the fridge)

- a good dollop of light greek yoghurt or sour cream

- a heaped teaspoon of wholegrain or dijon mustard

- a couple of cloves of crushed garlic

- 3 chopped spring onions

- a chopped handful of chives

Cook the potatoes in boiling water and then drain and cool (this can be done the night before if you are preparing for entertaining).  Mix all the other ingredients in a bowl and then stir through the cooled potatoes.  That's it, easy as!  If you want to glam it up a bit to make it a meal with a green salad instead of BBQ then it is great with some bacon or salami added to it. mmmmm  I want to eat this now dammit.