The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Growing => Vegetables => Topic started by: Big Mat on February 19, 2017, 03:51:02 pm
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Hi all,
I only have a small area that i can grow vegetables on this year. I usually buy a couple of different varieties of potatoes from Marshalls, but the 2kg packs will be too much and I'll end up wasting them.
Is there anywhere selling smaller packs, perhaps 1/2kg? Any suggestions
thanks
Mat
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Try swapping with someone in your area.
I bought my from wilko this year :wave:
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some of your local garden centres may sell by weight with no minimum weight. at least the one I rent land off does
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Not got a local(ish) potato day? Ours is next w/end and they sell by the individual tuber. Great - you can try so many varieties!
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This might sound like sacrilege but I have always done well from the ones at B&Q
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I grow my seed potatoes that I buy local in black bins. Saves space and works well for me.
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A lot of the time I've chitted up a shop purchased potatoes we've enjoyed sneaked from the kitchen .
So long as it is a medium egg size , I then put the spud eyes up in a paper mache egg box cup fitting & leave them on the bedroom window cill on a north facing window till it chits up .
TIP during WW2 int eh UK the German prisoners of war used to try and thwart the war effort .
So they would plant potatoes inthe farmers fields upside down , they also took too breaking the potatoes in half pushing the break face down in the soil . It didn't do them much good for the upside down spuds gre nirmally & most of the time the broken spud part also grew into full crop bearing plants.
The broken potato thing was discovered early on by a Yorkshire farmer who also spoke fluent German when he heard the prisoners talking , bragging & laughing about what they had done .
It was reported to the Ministry of Food , trials were undertaken to see what the true long term effect would be .
Sometimes the halves rotted , sometimes they grew . It was found out that the potatoes that bled the most starch were the ones th at rotted the most .
Further experiments were undertaken ..it was found that dipping the cut face of the potato in garden lime caused it to stop bleeding . The lime would also help release nutrients in the soil for the potato to take up ( WIN WIN ??? )
It was also discovered that so long as you have one eye on the treated part that you have a very good chance of growing a health plant from it .
It wasn't long before the mathematicians got going and worked out that by quartering every seed potato , ensuring there was at least one eye in each part & liming the cuts that you could reduce the amount of seed stocks held back. Thus making more potatoes available to the close on starving population of the UK .
When I first read of the idea at Christmas 199 3 I begged four seed spuds of a farmer friend , told him why & what I was going to do .
We got 13 well stocked plants from the 16 quarters I planted .... so I know it works & is not fairy stories
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nice bit of history there clodhopper thanks for that. I love learning little gems like that
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Yesterday I Wilkos they had small bags of 5 potatoes each of different varieties. Worth trying?
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We are going to Bridge End Garden Cente, Freuchie for ours.
They have loads of varieties and you can buy as many or as few as you want.
Which is good for us as we have small raised beds at the allotment and (OH) like to try different varieties every year.
We have in the past gone to the local Potato Day where the choice is limited.
The upside of going elsewhere is that we have a totally different selection from everyone else at the allotment and that is much more fun. ;D
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Thank all,
I ended up going to B&Q and buying 1kg of King Edward seed for £2. I dug some extra ground over and just planted the one variety this year.
I've taken on some land at the in-laws house, it's very overgrown but theres a good sized potato plot and a poly tunnel that needs recovering. So next spring it'll be 3 or 4 varieties of potato.