Which potatoes?

 Potato Seed variety selection for your plot

I don’t want to teach my grandmother to suck eggs but selecting the right potato variety can help you get better results.

It depends what you use your potatoes for of course, boiled, mashed, chips, roasties or more adventurous dishes like dauphinoise potatoes, gratin potatoes or herby potatoes but there are varieties that will be good all rounders and give good results for most uses.

Chips, particularly, but also roasties, require a bit higher dry matter in the spud, this does depend on variety, but generally a more mature potato that has grown for longer will have higher DM content so if you are a chip lover leave them in the ground until they mature and you get skin set (that is when the skin no longer scrapes easily and they are ready for storing).  

I try to get hold of the second early variety Estima as my favoured all rounder. They are oval shaped and when immature they make excellent salad potatoes, served small and skin on they are every bit as good as Charlotte or Nicola and personally I think much tastier than Maris Peer. When Estima mature the make a good roasty, they mash well and are also excellent for chips.

Maris Piper is an excellent all-rounder, favoured to this day by fish and chip shops. They probably make the best chips and roasties but I accept this statement may be open to challenge. They are prone to blight, and skin quality is often compromised as they easily fall victim to common and powdery scab, so good rotation on your plot is essential but I will discuss pests and diseases in a bit more detail as the season progresses.

Charlotte are fairly versatile, they do make excellent salad potatoes when small, but when the tubers get large the waxy nature reduces and they make an adequate chip or even mash variety.

King Edward are an old favourite they are probably the best mashing spud available still, but avoid par boiling them for roasties unless you time it very well as they soon go to mash in the pot.

For Earlies there are many choices, Aran Pilot & Pentland Javelin to name just two old favourites, but the seed catalogues are full of very good early varieties. These can be planted from late February to early March. While frosts are expected they will still need protection although the early varieties are a little hardier. Fleece is good, or straw, as the potatoes will grow beneath the fleece or through the straw. An old bit of carpet can give good protection before emergence, you must just take the carpet off as the potatoes emerge (all potatoes need light as soon as they emerge to get good photosynthesis to make starches and sugars for the developing tubers).

Experienced growers will have their own views on varietal choice and I would not dare to tell an experienced gardener that my choices are better than theirs. As I have told farmers and growers over the years: they are the best judge of what does best on their land, but if you are just starting out as a new plot holder then I hope the above may be of some value.

Good spudding