Kitchen Garden Forum

Hi, When should I plant out any seed potatoes, what is the earliest time that I can do this, and would these be call early? or main crop etc, I have never done potatoes before and would like to try Anya, can any one help with explaining what early/main crops are and when to plant, or can I use one potatoes for both early main and late etc
SB

basically the difference is how long the plant needs to be growing to reach maturity. in general eary and main crop spuds are planted at the same time, earlies produce edible spuds earlier than main crop varieties. planting date depends on when you expect the last frost cos the young plants will be killed by frost. Easter weekend is the benchmark, but if easter is early dont worry about being a week or two later.
thats the simple traditional bit.... you can protect the young shoots with straw or fleece so they survive a frost, so you can plant a week or two earlier, using a polytunnel and fleece, you can experiment with all sorts of dates. try googling "new spuds for christmas" and see what comes up.

Skinnybum, I like to try to get an extra early crop in by warming up the soil with fleece or whatever in February and planting in early March. I have occasionally succeeded in digging up a crop around May 20, but usually the young plants have been frost-nipped and the others have caught up.

Joy larkcom's organic gardening book gived the following time-scale:
Very First earlies: 75 days
First earlies: 90 days
2nd earlies: 120 days
Early maincrop: 150 days
late m-c: 175 days.

In practice, my maincrops have always been ready earlier, as either blight or dry weather withers the leaves. This year I put my Pink Fir Apple [late m-c] in around April 20 and dug them all by the middle of September. My other late maincrop, Sarpo Mira, are more blight-resistant and they were still in leaf in October; I dug up the last of them 2 weeks ago.

you can plant earlies at any time throughout the year, but they shouldn't chit for too long, so in practice that limits your time-range for planting.

good luck
mike