Fizz

Sack Of Spuds

This year I trialled a new way of growing potatoes, by growing them in bags. In previous years I have grown them in the ground or in large containers.

The advantage of growing in a bag is that it is easier to "earth up" the plant as it grows (you just roll up the sides of the bag and add more soil, covering the stem but leaving the topmost part of the plant uncovered). This encourages the potato plant to produce roots from the buried stem, and is supposed to increase the amount of new potato tubers produced.

The potato was first chitted. This is done by leaving the seed potato on a sunny windowsill until the eyes form into hard, green nodules. The reason this is done is to give the potato a head start into growing when placed in the ground.

The chitted seed potato was planted in an empty compost bag. The sides of the bag were rolled down and 10cm of soil placed in the bottom before the seed potato was planted. Then more soil was used to cover the potato. As the plant grew, more soil was added when needed. Drainage holes were made in the sides if the bag.

In the last week the plant began to die back, approximately 4 months since planting. I suspect it was in part due to the wet weather we have had of late (the compost bag retained a lot of moisture despite having drainage holes). It was time to see how many new potatoes were produced. The bag was cut open to reveal 7 sizable new potatoes (each the size of my fist) and several small ones.

However only the bottom half of the soil contained any potatoes. I think the initial amount of soil I used was too shallow. Next time I will put in twice the amount at the bottom of the bag before planting the seed potato. I also found out that when growing potatoes, size matters. Trials done by the RHS have shown that the larger the seed potato, the bigger the crop of new potatoes. This is probably due to the fact that larger potatoes have a greater store of starch, which the developing plant can utilize as a food source while growing and producing new tubers.

So next year I will repeat the experiment, but using the largest seed potato I can find, and having twice the depth of soil under the developing tuber. I may ditch reusing a empty compost bag in favour of one made out of hessian.

As for the new potatoes I harvested, they were turned into delicious curried potatoes.

Faces: No. 2

Faces: No.1

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