Potato Surprise

The weather has been almost spring-like over the last few days with temperatures above average for late February. We made the most of the weather with a visit to Nostell Priory and had a walk around the gardens rather than the estate grounds. Ruby is not allowed into the gardens only the estate grounds.

The snowdrops planted amongst the trees are in full flower.

We have now almost finished using up the potatoes we grew last summer. They have been stored in paper sacks kept in the garage over winter to protect them from any frost. We are on our last bucket of Apache potatoes.

The only other potatoes we have left are some International Kidneys in a paper sack.

The one thing noticeable amount our remaining potatoes is that none of them are showing any signs of chitting.

We bought this year's seed potatoes from our local garden centre in early January. I always think the best place to store them is alongside our overwintering potatoes in the garage. Our newly bought seed potatoes were placed in paper sacks and left in the garage. As our eating potatoes were gradually being used I mentally made a note that there were no signs of any of them chitting. I put it down to the cold weather of January and early February.

With the arrival of some milder weather I thought I'd risk moving our seed potatoes into the greenhouse to start chitting. If any severely cold weather is forecast I'll move them into the garage for a few nights if necessary.

I was quite surprised when I took our Apache seed potatoes out of their paper sack as unlike the ones grown last year these had all started to chit. It was a good job I hadn't left them much longer because I wouldn't have been able to extract the shoots from the mesh bags they are sold in without damaging them. It's true to say that all our new seed potatoes have produced more signs of growth than the eating potatoes we have left from last summer. I can only think that it must be down to the way the seed potatoes are stored before sale. I certainly don't have any worries about the condition of potatoes.

The potatoes have all been covered with a couple of layers of fleece to keep them a little bit warmer through the night. The earliest any of them will be planted in the allotment will be the very end of March but more likely the beginning of April. We've even had good crops of potatoes planted in early May.

Copyright: Original post from A Gardener's Weather Diary http://ossettweather.blogspot.co.uk/ author M Garrett