Growing Potatoes in Your Spanish Garden

General Items
Crop Rotations
Crop Succession

Potato - Patata

One of the greatest joys in the vegetale garden has got to be digging potatoes as you need them, particularly new potatoes.

Buy your seed potatoes in good time and if possible, spread them in a light frost free area to chit (start to produce strong green shoots). This will get them off to a quicker start in the garden.
Ideally the seed potatoes should be smaller than those you would normally buy to eat resulting in more potatoes per Kg. If your seed are on the large side, you can cut them in two, giving you a greater number to plant, but you need to ensure that each half has a number of eyes (buds). This can be easier said than done as the eyes of a potatoe tend to be mostly on one end.

Potatoes will respond to well manured soil, so apply a good covering and rotovate in well before planting.
Make channels in the prepared soil approximately 10-15cm deep at the required row spacing and place the seed potatoes in postion, taking care not to break any young shoots produced during chitting.
Pull soil from between the rows over the seed to cover them and form the ridges in which potatoes are traditionally grown. You needn't make the ridges very high at this stage. More soil can be pulled over them once the shoots have started to come through.

Blog items relating to potatoes
13/09/07 Potatoes Emerging
The potatoes planted in the middle of August, in the hope of having new potatoes for Christmas, are emerging. It has to be said though that emergence .... more

01/09/07 Finished Using our Potatoes
It appeared to be quite a big sack full of potatoes that we put in store about 5 weeks ago but we have finished using them all now. I can report th .... more

19/08/07 Planting potatoes for Christmas
It might sound a strange time to be planting potatoes but the plan is that by replanting some of the potatoes we have just dug up, in the same ground, .... more

25/07/07 Harvested the Potatoes
Have dug up and stored all the potatoes. They were dying off naturally a few weeks ago, so stopped watering them and they all died off quickly then. .... more

14/05/07 Digging the first potatoes
A bit later than usual but it is always a joy to start digging potatoes, grab some mint on the way to the kitchen, cook and eat the new potatoes as pa .... more

24/03/07 Potatoes survived the frost
Woke up 2 days ago with the thermometer reading 2 degrees, half an inch of ice on the horses water bucket and a bitter wind blowing. Was woried about .... more

23/01/07 Preparing ground for potatoes
Making the most of dry soil conditions to rotovate gound ready for potatoes. When it is free of weeds, a good layer of horse manure will be applied an .... more