Potatoes from planting to clamp

In short

• An adult eats roughly 80 kg of potatoes a year: that's about 32 m² of field. Of that, 50–60 kg goes into the winter store.
• Plant only certified, healthy seed potatoes. Never potatoes from the supermarket or of unknown origin.
• Plant when the soil is 7–8 °C (45–46 °F): in lowland UK and Ireland late March to April, spacing 70 × 30 cm, depth 8–10 cm.
• Blight comes with warm, wet weather: check the crop twice a week from flowering, and sign up for blight alerts.
• Report any suspicion of wart disease, brown rot or ring rot, or a Colorado beetle in the UK and Ireland, to the plant health authority at once.

What's inside

Chapters

1. How many potatoes and which varieties
2. Seed potatoes: why only healthy ones
3. Notifiable diseases and pests
4. Soil, rotation and manure
5. Chitting and planting
6. Care: hoeing, earthing up and water
7. Blight: the most dangerous potato disease
8. Colorado beetle: hands, straw and rotation
9. Lifting and preparing for winter
10. Safety: green potatoes and haulm
11. Common mistakes
12. Printable checklist

Worksheets

• Area calculator by need
• Seed potato and yield calculator
• Potato field sketch
• A year of potatoes
• Inspection and seed potato log