It’s that time of year again when the potatoes have to be purchased ready for chitting. So on Saturday morning me and my Dad headed off to our local independent nursery to pick the lucky little seeds!
We love Gilberts, it’s a beautiful independent nursery filled with flowers, seeds, trees… in fact it has everything a gardener needs (including a tearoom!) The best thing about Gilberts is how they sell the seed potatoes, there’s a whole aisle filled with lots of large hessian and brown bags full to the brim with so many different variety of potatoes. You choose the ones you want, fill a bag with however many you need and then pay by weight at the till. It’s ever so handy when you are like me and my Dad and plan exactly how many potatoes you need, it also saves buying bags of seed potatoes when you don’t know how many are actually in each bag!
This year my Dad is growing 56 Kestral potatoes, 56 Cara and 18 International Kidney. I’m also growing 18 International Kidney potatoes and 18 Charlotte as well.
After choosing the potatoes I grabbed another packet of sweet pea seeds, this time I thought I would give the perrenial variety a go. The Sweet peas will be growing up my archway every year so I thought why not! We also chose a packet of pumpkin seeds called ‘Atlantic Giant’ ready to sow next month for our little friendly competiton.
And last but not least, I couldn’t resist buying two of these absolutely beautiful double Primroses, aren’t they lovely? I’ll plant them down by the pond for a bit of colour during this very wet and miserable weather we are having!
I hope everyone had a great weekend x
7 thoughts on “Potatoes and Primroses”
Nice pictures, my favorite is of your Dad picking potatoes in Gilberts. It must take a fair bit of space to chit all of your potatoes. Thanks for sharing, have a good week.
I’ve been following your blog for inspiration since getting the keys to my (tiny) first allotment last Autumn. I am planting potatoes too but not sure how many i can fit in - my bed is 1.2 m wide by 2.1 m long. How many potatoes would you suggest i can get in this bed ? ( i also have a large container to use for extra space)
That’s about the same width and a bit shorter than the beds I’m growing my early spuds in.I’d say you’d plant 10 in a zigzag pattern along the centre and then earth up from the sides to form a a wide row.
Last year my main crop varieties got riddled with slugs so I’m growing these in 30L pots this year. Container spuds worked very well when I only had my back garden for growing in before my allotment.
Inspired by this blog and just going out to look at sheds!
Try growing them in “potato towers”! Use some chicken wire or deer fencing to make a round column line the edges with straw and layer your seed potatoes all the way up as tall as you want to go! Saves a lot of space growing them vertically! I’m planning on doing something similar this year as my space is also limited but we are trying to be as self sufficient as possible!
Going to have to research if there’s a nursery like that around here. I normally get my seed potatoes from the local garden centre but just the little ‘to try’ packs as I only need about 10 of each variety. I’ve got everlasting sweet peas in the front garden but, and I don’t know if this is the same with all of them, but they have no fragrance which is a shame.
Hi Katie, up here in Suffolk, they hold an annual East Anglian Potato Day, which can be seen on my blog links. I have seen that you hold one in Hampshire as well. Here is a link.
http://potatoday.org/
Thanks for sharing, I wish we had something like potato (and seed) sharing days near my wife and I; we garden in Vermont, in the NE US. I especially liked the pictures. Your blog was interesting too, so I’ll be adding that to my list of things to follow as I get ready for the growing year to come.