planting potatoes

Earthing up gradually as the potatoes emerge allows you to kill lots of weeds. Each time you earth up you destroy a crop of weeds. At the same time you expose more weed seeds which germinate. At the next earthing up more weeds are destroyed, and so on. Treated in this way potatoes are an excellent cleaning crop.

Potato shoots always take the shortest route to the light. If you earth up when you plant they often break out of the side of the baulk instead of the top.

Todays early potato varieties, e.g. rocket, only take about 70 days to produce a crop. If they are planted on 17th March you should be digging them by the end of June. Chitting will have started the lifecycle going and will gain a few days more.

Late maincrop are rated at 120 days. Late earlies, second earlies, early maincrop etc are all somewhere in between.