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…
- Buy some seed potatoes
- 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.
- Plant them in the ground about 20cm deep and about 30cm apart.
- “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.
- Feed your potatoes every week, they will grow big and strong, just like me.
- 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 Easy Peasy Veg To Grow This Spring
You have seen in recent weeks I have been busy sowing seeds and getting a good head start for Spring. However, I know some of you maybe don’t have the time, space or even the inclination to get involved with the whole propagating indoors malarkey. Don’t worry though, there are LOADS of easy PEASy vegetables you can grow straight into the garden. Here is the “Lulu’s Garden” Top Ten veg to grow this Spring. Oh, and a quick and easy craft project to make your own plant labels too!
These teeny tiny sets will grow into big onions!
1. Beetroot
Beetroot is really easy to grow and yummy to eat. And it makes your hands go funky colours 🙂 Just sow a row of seeds, cover them over and watch them grow. Remember to thin out those seedlings as they come up so you can make room for some lovely big beets.
Gather your sets, seed potatoes and seeds
in a funky bucket like this one from Twigz (2)
2. Radish
Radish grow super fast, even faster than me! You just need a small area and just follow the same rules as beetroot and you will have some funky radishes to add to your salads in just a few weeks.
3. Peas
That’s right, I told you it was easy-PEASy! Sow your seeds, leaving some space between each one. Peas will need some support so they scramble upwards so add some canes and string. You can buy special varieties which are bushier and perfect for growing in pots too if you have less space.
Make sure you weed and prepare your
veg beds before you sow your seeds
4. Lettuce
Like radish, lettuce grows really fast and you will have your own salad in just a few weeks. I like sowing a mixed salad with different types of leaves in it and you just cut some when you need it and it keeps on growing. How clever is that?!
5. Tomatoes
Regular reader will know all about what keen tomato growers we are. We have all sorts of wonderful tips in our Tasty Tomato blog. You can grow them in a greenhouse but if you don’t have space go for a bush or tumbler variety which grows brilliantly in pots or even hanging baskets!
6. Potatoes
We all love potatoes don’t we? I love digging them up at the end too. Loads of fun! Growing them is dead easy, just plant them deep in the soil and cover up with soil. As the leaves come through keep “earthing up” (covering over with soil, lot’s of fun!) ’til they are way high in the air! You can grow them in a bag on your patio too if you don’t have a veg patch.
Our potato crop
7. Spinach
Spinach is another easy one to grow, just like lettuce. You can add it to salads or any of your cooking. Apparently it makes you really strong like Daddy too!
8. Courgettes
Courgettes are great to grow and I like to grow them in among our flowers rather than in the veg patch. They have lovely big leaves and funky yellow flowers (which you can eat too) and then the lovely courgettes appear. Make sure you water around (not over) the plant so the courgettes don’t rot. And watch out how quick they grow too or you will have marrows before you know it!
9. Onions
Onions are the basis of most meals we cook so we need a LOT of them. From pastas and risottos to pies and curries they are an essential ingredient which are really easy to grow. Growing them from teeny onion sets is really simple and they need very little attention other than some watering and weeding as we go. We always grow both white and red onions as well as shallots.
Make sure you space your onion sets out nicely like me
10. Spring Onions
You can’t have a spring veg list without Spring Onions can you?! Another one where you grow seeds in a row and thin out as seedlings come through. A lovely addition to salads and all sorts of cooking.
If you have never grown anything before why not choose just one thing off this list and give it a try? Whether it’s salad in a window box, tomatoes in a pot or potatoes in a bag there is always space to give it a bash. Let me know what you choose to grow this year and even better, send me some pics!
And don’t forget to label what you have sown so you remember what will be coming up. Forget expensive plant markers, why not make your own out of old lollipop sticks (1)…
- Lollipop sticks
- Paint
- Marker Pen
- Varnish
Make your own plant labels
To make:
1. Paint your lollipop sticks funky colours and leave to dry. You could draw pictures of what you are growing, add glitter or even make little people out of them too!
Easy to Grow Veg That’s Hard to Buy
So come on, join in and in just a few months you will be harvesting lots of lovely, home grown goodies.
1. Thank you to the wonderful, clever people at the RHS for the idea to make your own plant labels. For more cool projects like this read the fabulous “RHS Garden Projects” book.
2. Also, a BIG shout out to the cool people at Twigz who have designed a great range of garden tools for children, some of which you can see me using in this blog. I will tell you lots more about them in future blogs…
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…
- First, dig and collect the potatoes. Be careful with your fork as you don’t want to spear all the potatoes and ruin them.
- 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
- 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
- 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.
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!