About Us

My photo
Hackney, London, United Kingdom
We are a gardening club at Lauriston Primary School in Hackney, East London

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Potato time

Now the soil has warmed up a bit we are ready to start planting outside.

The first thing we plant is potatoes. To get our potatoes off to a good start we 'chit' them. This means we let our seed potatoes make some shoots before we plant them. You can do this by standing your potatoes in an empty egg box in a light but cold place. They should look like this.



Potatoes like lots of food so we dug out some compost, see how many worms there are!


Next we dug a ten cm hole and filled it in with some of the compost. We put our potato in and covered it up, there should be about 40cm between each plant.

Here is Charlie planting his potato. It is a quick growing variety, gardeners call these 'earlys'.
It should be ready to eat in June. As the potato grows we will draw up the earth around the plant, this stops light leaking in to the tubers and turning them green.

We planted three different varieties, Coleen, an organic seed potato, Rocket which is another early and Rudolph which is a main crop potato will be ready in August. Which will taste the best?