With April I have started spending more time in the veg garden, up to 2 days a week, which is something I have worked to achieve, as I expect that veg growing will be a relevant part of my future involvement in horticulture.
One of the first crops that I’ve been involved with has been potatoes.
I staked some early potatoes ‘Jazzy’, which had been grown in bags after being started indoors in week
13, which we then displayed in the glasshouse in the veg garden.
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| Potato ‘Jazzy’ being staked | Potato ‘Jazzy’ in the glasshouse |
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| Potato fertiliser |
I fertilised the soil where potatoes would go in in week 14 (end of
March) by top dressing it before the rain came. We used general
fertiliser at 10 g per sqm.
Today (week 18) I planted some second earlies. At 40 cm between them in rows 60 cm apart, we planted them at 10 cm depth, by using a marked stick and adding 50 g potato fertiliser per hole, well forked in (it will need another 50 gr as topdressing at emergence, in 2 weeks).
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| Marking the spacing of potato | Planting at the right depth |
As we were expecting one of the last frosts, I was also asked to earth
up the other potatoes that had emerged. With soil from either side of
the row, we covered every single leaf to avoid it getting damaged.
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| Potato ‘Catriona’ earthed up | Week 20 and ‘Catriona’ has emerged again, safe from frosts now |
We had some sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) slips too so I was shown how to root them in propagation, by laying them in a tray.
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| Rooting Ipomoea batatas | |
