How to grow early variety potatoes that will provide a crop until Christmas Now is the time to be buying your seed potatoes – allow me to recommend a few. I was buttonholed by a gardening neighbour recently. He had read my recommendation of the old potato variety Sharpe’s Express. His first query related to my having referred to it as an “early variety”. I suppose it is fairly late as early varieties go, but what puzzled my friend even more was that I said it will remain in the ground, or in storage after lifting, something he imagined was only true of a maincrop variety.
SO, how many different types of potato do you reckon are grown around this world of ours? And just what proportion of them can you buy in the shops? The answer to the former is more than 500. And to the latter? About 15. That is one of the powerful arguments for growing your own. The others, of course, are taste and efficacy knowing that those fresh potatoes came from your own hand, grown in your own, good, earth. I can’t believe that nearly a year has spun by since I wrote my last piece extolling the virtues of growing your own spuds, just a couple of months before we were trapped by Lockdown 1 in Nepal. With increasing age, time spins ever faster but certain imperatives will remain until I am too old to raise a spade.
Country Life
Trending: Kestrel potatoes are one of the best British potato varieties to grow yourself. Credit: Terry Brooks / Getty
Mark Diacono runs through his go-to list of British potato varieties to grow and explains how to help them avoid the dreaded potato blight.
For a few years now, most of the potatoes I’ve grown have been nutty, early, French salad potatoes. I love them, but, delightful as this Continental affair has been, it has rather clouded my memory about the pleasure of potatoes from these islands. This year, my hand may be forced: the twin delights of Brexit and Covid-19 mean that no one knows if, when, or for how much they might be able to import and sell varieties from the EU. Like it or not, it may be only British varieties this year. And I like it.