Allotments 4 All

Hi all

I know you can buy seed potatoes, but is there another way!?
Can you just use potatoes that you have bought? I know my Granddad used to grow potatoes and they just used to come up year after year without him planting any additional seeds. I guess that whether or not you use seed potatoes may affect the quality of the produce?

Any info would be great

There is no reason why you can't use 'shop bought' varieties other than when you buy from a recognised seed merchant they will guarantee them to be 'Disease free' (how I don't know)

Shop/ supermarkets etc can not guarantee this, so the choice is yours!

Thanks Tee Gee I will give it a go.

Is it best to just plant them whole, or to cut a slice off them and plant that?

Victorian kitchen-gardeners used to save their biggest spuds to use as the next year's seed. Turns out from various experiments (GW among them, I think) that they were right. Big seed spuds give bigger yields and big spuds.

So according to that logic, you'll be better off planting whole spuds. Plus there's less chance of disease getting in, natural spud skin being better proof against that than dried/healed cut skin.

The only 'eating spuds' I've used as seed have been UK-grown and from specialist growers (pricey posh varieties from Waitrose!) but I've had no problem with diseases.

We only got our lottie at the end of March last year and just put in a load of sprouting market bought spuds plus a few that we found in the compost heap.   Most of them were fine - there were a couple of no shows, but by and large, we got a good yield for nowt.  This year, though, we bought seed potatoes because I wanted mainly earlies/second earlies, so I wanted to know what we were planting.

Thanks for all the advice.

I think I am going to get some good quality eating potatoes from a reputable supplier and then stick the biggest ones in the ground or in a barrel/bin and see how I get on.

:)