Kitchen Garden Forum

Hi
Is there collective wisdom on sources and varieties for late planting spuds?
As my volunteer gardening has on just resumed (we restarted on 1 June after 12 weeks suspension) and I thought that amonst other things we might pop in should be spuds.

You views are welcome.

I fell for the advertising of planting spuds for Christmas, complete waste of time.

When lifting our main crop my Dad used to plant 4 of them in the cold frame, these were eaten at Christmas, I shall do the same this year too.

I would think planting potatoes now would be ok as long as you don't get any early frosts, say, in September/October. Plant earlies because they mature more quickly. Even a small yield would be better than nothing!

One year when there was barley not far off coming into ear in the back field here.. the farm arrived and mowed a large rectangle down, ploughed and worked the ground......
Then we saw the potato planter arrive....

I have a feeling it was a crop for canning..so in those days wonder if it was Maris Peer.? I think there must have been some reason why an original planting location was not available and perhaps there was an agreed acreage reqd to be grown against a laid down contract..??

C.

I have been saving some Charlotte seed potato sets, kept back from the ones purchased at the beggining of this year and they will be planted at the end of this month. I have doing this for several years now and they have good sized potatoes on them by late September... these will get left in the ground and used as New Potatoes, right through to March, or later. They never suffer from slug damage, what is a real bonus...I suppose the only slight down side is, it can be a bit messy digging them fresh when it has been really wet.
Just one more thing, I just leave them under the greenhouse bench in the light, so the shoots don't get long...the sets might go a little shrivelled but, that doesn't seem to affect the growing at all.

I think it will be worth a shot.