Chitting potatoes, un chitted potatoes and wood.

The hours of sunlight are forever getting longer, as of today we have an extra 1hour and 16 minutes compared to the shortest hours of day light back on the 21st December. But we still need more to get into the full swing of growing, you should never wish your life away, but this time of year is much like Christmas to a small child, you simply can not wait to open the presents. As adults though we learn to wait, and distract ourselves with other things, there is still jobs to do, and although we are 6 weeks away from sowing potatoes we have to prepare, and one of those jobs is chitting potatoes.

We have 6 varieties of which I will list below, 2 bags of each. Our lass bought this very useful shelving, which as per usual I found the use for it before our lass did. As you can see I have put out to chit one bag of each variety we have, whilst leaving the other bag of each type of potato in a cool dry garage. Then when planting we will do a row of chitted and non chitted and lets see what happens.

This was the selection purchased.

• Potato 'Cara' (Late maincrop) - Creamy skin and striking bright red eyes.
• Potato 'Maris Bard' (First early) - Smooth white skinned tubers with white flesh, heavy cropping variety with good drought and common scab resistant.
• Potato 'Kestrel' (Second early) - Producing tubers of consistent size and shape, with attractive, smooth skins and violet eyes.
• Potato 'Lady Christl' (First early) - Very early, smooth oval, pale yellow skinned tubers with creamy flesh that remains firm on cooking.
• Potato 'King Edward' (Late maincrop) - The creamy white flesh has a light, floury texture and rarely discolours on cooking
• Potato 'Valor' (Late maincrop) - Exceptional yields of quality general purpose potatoes for all culinary uses.

• Lady Christi has been replaced by 
• First early.Potato 'Swift' is among the fastest maturing of the first early varieties, being the quickest to produce heavy crops of round, smooth, white-fleshed baby new potatoes, and producing larger tubers than Potato 'Rocket'. Its short bushy habit makes it ideal for containers or potato bags where space is limited. Potato 'Swift also has partial double eelworm resistance.

The plan is that the whole bed will be ready for 2nd to 3rd week of March as much as any plans stay the same, split the bed into six, then sow chitted potatoes to the right unchitted to the left. Well, thats the plan, still to be done as of yet.

The potato bed, when the frosts allow, hope to dig in the last of the manure/straw so it can be ready for sowing.

And finally.....

We put out a general request if anyone had any spare scaffolding boards. The above photograph shows the haul we got. Walkways, raised beds and I even have an idea for a table. Watch this space.