The joy of hunting for new potatoes in a pot full of compost is childishly thrilling. I am always excited by the prospect of tipping over a pot to find this edible gold. For this reason, I think they are one of the best container vegetables: easy, reliable and very tasty. All you need is a large pot, 20 litres (the size of a florist’s bucket) or more, some compost and a few seed potatoes.
Potatoes are categorised by the time they take to mature. Earlies are usually planted in March and make new potatoes. These tend to be ready in June and July. Second earlies go in early to mid-April and are ready in July and August, and main crops are planted in mid- to late April and are ready from August to October. There is nothing to stop you planting your earlies now – you’ll just get a later succession. You can plant right up to June, as long as your seed potatoes have been stored somewhere cool, so they are still plump and healthy.
If you can, choose a variety that is hard to find in the shops: the thin-skinned early ‘Red Duke of York’ or the nutty ‘Epicure’, a waxy salad potato such as ‘Ratte’ or the nobbly ‘Pink Fir Apple’, the dark-blue-skinned ‘Blue Danube’ with its fluffy interior that is perfect for roasting, or the delightful ‘Smile’, with each eye grinning at you. There are hundreds of potatoes to choose from; stick to earlies and salad potatoes if you have limited space, because you’ll have time to follow with another crop such as salads or leafy greens.
Place about 30cm of compost in your pot, container or grow bag and nestle your potatoes in. You want no more than three potatoes in a 40-litre pot, overcrowding will just mean lots of small potatoes.
Fill your pot with compost, just to the surface. It is important that your potatoes are buried deep in the pot so that they do not go green. Green potatoes are poisonous: they occur when the tubers receive sunlight. Your tubers need to be roughly a quarter of the way down the pot (they should be buried at least 15cm deep). It used to be said that you needed to earth up the potatoes in the pot, covering them with layers of compost as the new leaves appear, but recent potato growing trials have shown that you get just as good results by plunging them in a full container of compost.
A good crop comes from regular watering and feeding. You need to see water pour out from the drainage holes at the base. When this happens, the whole pot is saturated and all the tubers will get a drink. Just giving a surface watering means that only the top layers of potatoes will grow big.
Earlies are ready when the flowers open or the buds drop off. Have a careful furtle to feel the tubers are a decent size and, if so, topple the pot on to some plastic, because you can reuse the compost and delight in your finds. Second earlies are similar, but wait a beat until the flowers fade; main crops are ready when the foliage starts to turn yellow.
