Welcome back to another blog! Today will be the first blog in a small series. I was very kindly gifted 5 different varieties of potatoes by The Potato House.

 
The varieties I am growing are: Shetland Black, Highland Burgundy Red, Record, Heidi Red and Setanta Potatoes

Over the series of blogs, I???ll take you through the process of how I am growing them. You can grow potatoes almost anywhere which is so cool. I decided to plant my potatoes in Bag’s For Life as we already had some and did not want to spend money on larger bags.

Apparently you can even grow them in wellies if you would like!

When you plant potatoes, you don’t plant them out straight away. What you do is you need to do some ‘chitting’. Very strange word… I didn’t hear it correctly the first time I heard it 🙂

Chitting is used to speed up the process by placing the potatoes eyes up in an egg box. You then place them somewhere that gets sunlight (but not direct sunlight) for up to two weeks and you will begin to see the ‘eyes’ of the potatoes grow quite rapidly.

I only placed them on the windowsill for a week as potatoes need to be planted at the end of May, at the latest. Also when my potatoes came, some arrived some already had ‘eyes’ and the weather and soil was warm enough outside already!

After a week of having the potatoes on the windowsill, mum and I got out our Bags For Life and cut holes in the bottom for drainage. We decided to use some pots too which we had around the garden and already have drainage holes.

I filled the bags and pots with about 5cm/inches of soil before placing the potatoes on top. I labelled the pots and bags with the type of potato so they wouldn’t get mixed up. Once the potatoes were evenly spaced out, I covered them with a layer of soil (just enough so that we could no longer see them) before watering them.

The potatoes are growing on our patio which gets lots of sunlight and we can see them growing from our kitchen. This is handy as we don’t forget to water them!

These are the first few steps of growing my potatoes and I’ll write you an update next week!

Check out the Potato House and make sure to contact them if you are interested in growing some yourself!

Make sure to check out my Facebook Page and Instagram for more!

Love Martha B x