How To Grow Potatoes

My latest blog tells you all you need to know to grow the perfect potatoes in an easy to follow guide. It’s gotta be simple, I’m only 5 right!

Lulu growing potatoes

How to grow potatoes…

1. Buy some seed potatoes
2. Chit your potatoes on a window sill as soon as you buy them. Chitting just means letting the wee “eyes” grow a bit longer which gives them a head start for when you pop them in the ground.
3. Plant them in the ground about 20cm deep and about 30cm apart.
4. “Earth up” your potatoes as soon as shoots start to appear, raking up the soil around them and covering them back up, protecting them from the sunlight. You will need to do this 2-3 times in the growing season.
5. Feed your potatoes every week, they will grow big and strong, just like me.
6. Early varieties will be ready in 8 weeks, main crops in the summer. Gently move soil aside to pick your potatoes, you don’t need to pick them all at once and they taste best freshly picked.

Our potato crop

Top tips:

• You can grow potatoes anywhere. Veg beds, compost bags, specialist potato bags, old tyres, tall pots, whatever you have to hand.
• Potatoes need drainage so if you have clay soil then dig in some gravel. You are planting in pots, raise the pots and make sure they have drainage holes.
• Potatoes like sunshine (like me!) so don’t grow them in a shady corner.
• Always water the base of the plant not the foliage.
• Remove flowers when they appear to put more energy into the tuber the plant is creating.
• Dig up your potatoes on a dry day and leave them to dry in the sun for an hour.

Lulu x

10 Super Easy Spring Veg To Grow

Saturday 19th March is the Spring Equinox and officially the first day of Spring yippee. That means sunnier days, lighter evenings and most importantly more time to play in the garden! It also means it’s time for me to get busy growing veg again so to help you along, here are my TEN easiest Spring veg to get growing…

Here we grow!

Before you start to grow any veg, take a minute to remove any weeds or large stones from your veg beds and give them a wee hoe over. If you haven’t already added a soil improver over winter now is a great time to add some nutrients to help your veg grow big and strong (just like me!). Done? OK, let’s go…

1. BEETROOT

This is one of my favourite root vegetables to grow as it is super-duper easy. Beetroot prefer a well drained soil so add some sand if yours is a bit sticky. Now, just sprinkle some seeds in a long row and gently cover. As the seedlings come through thin them out to allow big juicy beetroot to grow.

2. SALAD

Now under the heading of “Salad” I am covering lettuce leaves, rocket and spinach as they are all equally easy to grow. I especially love the “cut and come again” salad leaves as they just keep on growing the more you eat them. Wowsers!

3. RADISH

You have got your salad growing so you will need some radish growing with it. The best thing about radish is how quick it grows. Within a few days you will see it popping up. Sow successional rows so you always have radish to eat.

Prep your soil then sow your seeds in a nice neat row

4. PEAS

Another easy-peasy (ha, see what I did there?!) veg to grow and yummy to eat (it’s one of Tilda’s favourites!) If you don’t want to train big tall ones up lines then opt for a dwarf bush variety. I love popping the peas out of their pods!

5. POTATOES

An absolute staple in our garden and super easy to grow. Buy some seeds potatoes and let them chit on your window sill for a couple of weeks before burying them deep in your veg patch. Cover over the leaves as they pop through (this is called “earthing up”) and you will have a yummy batch of tatties come summer!

6. ONIONS

Another easy one, just buy onion “sets” which are teeny weeny onions and plant them in your veg area. They will soon grow into much bigger onions for you to pick.

Teeny weeny onion sets!

7. SWISS CHARD

Not only is swiss chard super healthy (it is full of vitamins and minerals) but it is also soooooo pretty. As well as growing it in your veg patch you can grow it in your flower beds where its colourful stalks will be a lovely addition to the garden.

8. TOMATOES

If you are an expert like me then you can grow a wide variety of tomatoes in your greenhouse. But here’s a secret tip, choose a “tumbler” or “bush” variety and they will be super happy growing in a pot in a sunny corner of your garden. The bonus is you don’t have to “pinch out” this type of tomato or tie them up as they grow. And they will give you the most delicious cherry tomatoes you have ever tasted! And much easier than going to the supermarket to buy them!

9. COURGETTES

This year I am growing both green and yellow courgettes. I have planted the seeds in little trays in the house and when they are a LOT bigger I will plant them outside in big pots where they will give me lovely courgettes all summer long. I’ll need to be fast though to beat the cheeky snails who love them too!

Here I am checking for courgettes

10. SPRING ONIONS

Well it wouldn’t be a Spring veg blog without a Spring Onion would it? Like beetroot, just sprinkle some seeds in a line and thin out the seedlings as they come through. Couldn’t be easier!

Happy growing readers!

Lulu xx

Let’s Fight That Blight!

If you’re growing potatoes and tomatoes you’ll want to avoid a horrid sounding disease called late blight. It’s caused by the fungus Phytophthora infestans (now that’s hard to say!) The fungus normally appears in the UK from July or August and loves to grow in wet, humid conditions. Read on to find out how to identify it, what to do if you get it and what you can do to try to prevent it.

Not a hint of blight in sight!

How to look out for blight

Within 3 days of the fungus landing on a leaf the initial symptoms appear.  Small, dark spots develop into lesions. There is often a halo of light green issue around the dark brown lesion. The leaves will shrivel up and turn brown. In humid conditions you might see a white fungus growing around the edges of the undersides of leaf lesions.  Next the brown lesions spread to stems and if untreated rain will wash the fungus down to the developing crop of potatoes and tomatoes.  Potatoes will develop a red-brown decay below the skin and will rot quickly in storage. Green tomatoes will develop brown patches and ripe fruit will again spoil quickly.

If you live in a blight-prone area you should register with blightwatch. It’s a free service provided to potato farmers but us amateur gardeners can use it too.  It calculates the risk of blight being in your postcode based on weather conditions

How to treat blight

Dealing quickly with an attack is key.  If you catch it early you might be able to remove and destroy any diseased leaves.  Ideally burn this material or bury it more than 45cm underground. If more than a quarter of the foliage is affected or if the stems are affected then you will have to remove and destroy the whole plant.  If it is late in the growing season you can remove the potato foliage near soil level and leave the developing potatoes in the soil for 2-3 weeks to harden the skin and allow the fungal spores to die before harvesting and eating.

How to avoid blight

Blight survives over winter in infected seed potatoes, diseased potatoes dumped by your veg plot and in unharvested potatoes left in the soil which will sprout the following season. Black nightshade and bittersweet are common weeds in Britain that can also be a natural host and spreaders of blight. The majority of infections in gardens are due to spores being blown on the wind from neighbouring gardens and allotments. So unless you want angry neighbours, make sure your garden is as clean as possible. Also make sure that you’ve removed all potatoes at harvest time. Don’t just use any old potatoes as seed the following year but buy certified seed from reputable suppliers.

Our trug full of lovely perfect potatoes

How to get the better of blight

In blight-prone areas you will have best success with first and second early potato varieties as these are harvested earlier, giving the fungus less chance to attack. You can still get blight in older cultivars of potatoes and tomatoes that are labelled as “blight resistant”.  This is because the fungus has changed over time and learned to attack these cultivars. Despite having pretty sounding names such as Pink 6, Blue 13 and Green 33 these new strains are highly infectious.

Make sure to chit your potatoes before planting as this will give a shorter time to harvest and less time to be susceptible to the fungus.
If you’re growing more than one variety of potatoes you can try to alternate rows of varieties with lower and higher blight resistance. This can reduce spread of milder cases.

If possible grow crops on a 4 year rotational basis so your earth has a chance to clear plant specific diseases in between crops.Blight typically affects tomatoes grown outside so you should have better success in avoiding the disease in plants grown in the greenhouse. Despite “Feline” and “Legend” tomatoes being labelled as resistant, they will succumb in prolonged humid conditions.

Suttons Seeds have just started to sell a new variety called Crimson Crush that they claim is the “world’s first fully blight resistant tomato”.

Perfect Potatoes with Twigz

Our lovely friends at Twigz have supplied us with some awesome gardening equipment which I have used ALL year. One of my favourite things to grow is potatoes. Here I tell you a little about what I have grown, how my Twigz tools have helped and also a crafty project if you have a left over potato…

Me getting stuck into the tattie harvesting with some help from Twigz

Way back in March, I told you about 10 Easy Peasy Veg to Grow this year. Did you manage to grow any? One of the things I grew was potatoes, Maris Peer potatoes to be precise. They are really easy peasy to grow. You need to:

• Collect your seed potatoes in your handy Twigz bucket

• Clear/weed the area you want to plant the potatoes in using your Twigz hand tools

Twigz do a wonderful range of garden tools for children

• Dig holes using your Twigz trowel to plant your seed potatoes in.

• As the potatoes grow and you see the green leaves sprouting, cover them up (it’s called “earthing up”) until they get so high you can’t cover them any more.

• Keep your potatoes well watered while they are growing using your Twigz watering can.

• Keep the area around the potatoes well weeded

• Once the foliage has died back you can dig the potatoes up (time to get that trowel and bucket at the ready again!)

• Eat (yummy. Twigz need to make a knife and fork set for this part!)

Our trug full of lovely perfect potatoes

So there you have it, easy peasy potatoes in one year. They store really well through winter too, just keep them in a hessian bag in a cool, dark spot. (The hessian bag is perfect for the sack race come Spring time too!)

Potato Stamping

Potato stamping fun

We cut some cool shapes

Perfect Potatoes

Potatoes are great, aren’t they? They are a bit like me, wonderfully versatile 😉 As you all know by now, I am Lulu the Secret Blogger, and I like to update you on what is happening in my garden as well as lots of other general gardening wonderments. Today, I am mostly talking perfect potatoes (or top tatties!)

M&D have tried many varieties of potatoes over the years, some good, some not so good. They reliably informed me that one of their favourites was Maris Peer so that was what we chose to plant again this year. Way back in April, when it felt like summer would never arrive, we planted our seed potatoes in our raised beds. Over the months I watched with amazement as plants would poke through the surface of the soil which would then be covered over again with earth until they sprouted so high they were free to sun themselves. Flowers appeared and then, eventually, the foliage slowly started to die back. One day, Daddy announced it was time to dig deep in the raised beds and see what we could find – how exciting! Just like a treasure hunt. Here are some photos of how to successfully dig up potatoes, Lulu-style…

1. First, dig and collect the potatoes. Be careful with your fork as you don’t want to spear all the potatoes and ruin them.
2. Next, carefully inspect each potato. Teeny small ones, green ones & rotten ones are all discarded.
   

   Quality control is very important when you are sorting perfect potatoes

3. Then, carefully put the potato in the correct trug. One for good potatoes, one for the discarded potatoes. It’s important to remember which one is which!
   

   Our trug full of lovely perfect potatoes

4. It is very hard work so if you feel tired, have a wee lie down! They did say this was a raised bed!

Have a lie down in the veg beds – it is such hard work!

5. Serve them with some of the other lovely veg from your garden, yum!

A plate full of lovely home grown veg

We grew our potatoes in our raised beds but you can grow potatoes anywhere – in your flower border, in a pot, in a compost bag. They are super-easy to grow, really cheap and they taste so much nicer than supermarket potatoes.

Store your potatoes in a hessian sack in a cool, dry place like your shed or garage. They will keep well for a few months but keep checking on them and remove any that are starting to show signs of rot straight away.

Hope you have as much fun as I did digging (and eating) up potatoes! Click here to read about what else we have harvested this year.

Lulu

Harvest, Hooray!

I had a really fun weekend here at Vialii Towers with M&D. On Saturday it was really quite wet so we stayed indoors and did lots of fun arty projects with crayons, pencils, paints and glue! On Sunday the weather was a lot better which meant we could get outside and give the garden a bit of a tidy It was also time to harvest some of the fruit and vegetables we have been growing over recent months.

Sometimes what we were picking didn’t quite make it to the basket…

Now, regular readers will know that we had quite an array of vegetables we were growing this year. Some things didn’t do so well like the spring onions ‘cos someone kept climbing up onto the veg beds and lying there (1). And the cavolo nero suffered as the caterpillars decided they were going to get in there first (2)! Not to worry as we still had loads more things we were growing. Here is a pic of a few of the things we did manage to harvest at the weekend:

We harvested lots, from parsnips to chard and beetroot to turnips! Oh and some potatoes and apples too!

Lulu

1. I can’t imagine who that could have been!We had a scrummy dinner with the potatoes and Mummy roasted the beetroot, parsnips and courgette. Then she made a rhubarb crumble and a lovely Rhubarb & Lemon Cake.

2. Next year I am going to insist that we cover the kale in netting before butterflies can lay their eggs and caterpillars get munching!

Growing Our Own

This time last year we were in a bit of a tizzy as we had just had Lulu and every minute was taken up with our new bundle. We just about managed to throw a few seed potatoes and onion sets into our veg patch and not a lot else. Whilst family life is still our central focus we have managed to spend a bit more time in the garden already this year and started to get Lulu used to horticultural life. This weekend we managed to get all of our veg sown, and miracle of miracles it happened the same weekend as Monty sowed his on Gardeners’ World. (1). So here’s what we are looking forward to from our modest veg patch this year as we are growing our own…

Lulu shows she’s willing to muck in and help

1. Potatoes: Last year we grew “Maris Peer” potatoes for the first time and we really loved their waxy texture and nutty taste. Perfect for boiling. So this year we stuck with what we love and gone with that again.
2. Onions: Nothing out of the ordinary here. “Sturon” as our white onion, Red Barons for our erm, red onion (!) and “Golden Gourmet” shallots.
3. Salad Leaves. Just a general packet of “Cut n Come Again”. We have left space for sowing another row in a few weeks too for some extra summer salads.
4. Wild Rocket. A lovely addition to the above in our salads, over pizzas, stirred into pastas etc.
5. Radish “French Breakfast”. Think we’ll leave the French to have these for breakfast but we will certainly enjoy them in salads. And they grow so quick! We have left space for succession planting on these too.
6. Spinach “Bordeaux”. We’ll use this in both salads and cooked.
7. Sweetcorn “Sweet F1”. We have never successfully grown sweetcorn before so this will be an interesting experiment for us.
8. Squash “Sunburst F1”. Another first for us so watch this space.
9. Turnip “Purple Top Milan”. We lovely the sweetness of baby turnips.
10. Beetroot “Boltardy”. A staple in the Burt household. Great for both cooking and pickling (2)
11. Leek “Musselburgh”. We love leeks for both soups and general cooking.
12. Spring Onion “White Lisbon”. Another great addition to salads.
13. Parsnip “Palace F1”. Another newbie for us. We we were running out of space so we have planted a few seeds in a pot to see what will come of it.
14. Pea “Ambassador”. A firm favourite and although we will get limited crops as they have just been planted into a couple of troughs we will enjoy what we do get.

Our newly sown veg beds

Thanks for reading.

All at Vialii 

If you need advice on planting veg or are interested in incorporating a “Grow Your Own” area into your garden please get in touch.

1. Only really because Monty, like the rest of country, was delayed by the awful Spring weather rather than us being organised but we will take it anyway! It will NEVER happen again!

2. Add a few of the shallots into the jar and a few peppercorns when pickling.

3. The gooseberry bush was a gift from our lovely neighbour who was getting rid of it.

4. We are hoping to get a decent crop of raspberries as Lulu LOVES them and is eating us out of house and home!

5.Our existing herbs are looking old and tired, a bit like the pots they live in. So our plan is to build some new pots from old pallets we have at our yard. Watch this space for a future blog on this subject…