Christmas Gardening – Christmas Dinner – new potatoes

If you want new potatoes so late in the season, you have to plan ahead. Of course, it’s already too late for this year; but perfect timing to prepare for next Christmas. You need to make sure you select the early or second-early varieties. These late-planting (second-crop) varieties are, in fact, springtime seed potatoes but the tubers have been stored at low temperatures, so when they are delivered, they won’t have any shoots. They are usually sent out from early July to early August, so that they can be planted in warm summer soil without the need for chitting (leaving them to sprout). This means that the potatoes will be ready for lifting from late October, or as soon as the foliage is fully grown.

A similar propagation method - although it does involve chitting – can be ridiculously easy to carry out at home. Order about a dozen extra of your chosen seed potatoes in late winter and save them for planting later on. Leave these extra tubers in the seed tray where they are chitting, right through the summer, and plant them out on the last day of August. They will have huge long sprouts on them, and are best planted in containers rather than the ground – you need pots or tubs at least twelve inches across and the same deep and keep the compost uniformly moist – and make sure that you have a good rich compost in them, as it has to offer sufficient nutrients to maintain the growth of the plants.

Of course potatoes are frost-tender, so growing them late in the year can be a problem. You can have them in a cold greenhouse, or set them on a sheltered terrace. If neither of these options are possible, cover them over with fleece overnight and wrap the pots in sacking to keep of night frosts.

Christmas gardening new potatoes photograph by iLoveButter, used under a creative commons attribution licence