One potato, two potato... ten seed potatoes!

Seed potatoes

This is the year of the potato. At least, it could well be in my garden.

I've been given ten seed potatoes and some simple instructions as to how to plant them. So on the Easter weekend, in late April, I cleared a patch of soil and buried my gifts.

But the process of growing my own potatoes didn't start there. Three weeks earlier I laid out the seed potatoes on a sunny, south-facing windowsill, to encourage them to begin growing. Which they duly did, producing weirdly blobs and knobs of what were, I assume, the beginnings of a root system.

Planting the potatoes was quite straightforward. I dug two short trenches, about 15cm deep, and laid the potatoes into them with the newly-emerging roots facing downwards. I left a gap of around 15cm between each potato and around 25cm between the two trenches.

Then I covered over the seeds with soil and left them to it. I'm assured that with minimal further intervention I'll be harvesting my first potatoes in late summer or early autumn. That's something to look forward to, I think.