DH has decided he wants to grow tatties,where do we start

[SelkirkGrace]

Or potatoes for all you southerners Do we just go and buy plants of them or erm well how does it work?

Not sure, but you do realise they take up a lot of space that would be better with other veg probably (ie fairly easy to find nice, cheap, good quality potatoes because they keep and travel well; much harder to get nice fresh green veg like runner beans).

This is why we don't grow potatoes (also the ones left by previous owners got mildew!)

You could get some of these then they wouldn't take up much room...

We grew some in a stack of tyres last year - hardly takes any space.

Keep a bag of spuds til they start to sprout - fill 1 tyre with compost(grow bag will do), plant about 5 spuds. When plants start to come through the soil, add another tyre, fill with more growbag - repeat til stack is 3 tyres high.

After plants have flowered, dig down and harvest potatoes. We got about 5lbs of potatoes in each stack.

It's only because we have a patch of soil, and the soil isn't very good, and it was MIL who said it would be fine for tatties. Also we haven't ever grown veg before so thought these would be easy to try first

Did anyone else read this as 'DH has decided he wants to grow titties'?

I can't offer gardening advice. I'm too busy sorting myself out an appointment with the optician.

Good luck to your dh and his norks spuds.

Stick a compost bin on top of it. In a few years you'll have lovely compost and it will have improved the soil underneath too

Or put grow bags on top and stick in some runner beans or tomatoes. Super easy - even I can manage them and my gardening is atrocious!

I have some sprouting potatoes in the cupboard and spare space in my veg patch .

I'll give it a try this year.

its easy - just plant some sprouting spuds fairly deep and there you go. 2 years ago I grew some by mistake - some peelings had made it into the compost bin the previous year - we used some of our compost in the dahlia pots and got spuds as well!

the other thing you could try is growing them in bags - same principle as the stack of tyres, little less space. I've got a veg garden but I still grow the spuds in bags. You can either let a few that you've got in the veg rack sprout or you can buy them - most garden centres have them at the mo and you can also find cheap deals online.

As for keeping them,the key is to keep them in the dark and dry so they don't rot or sprout roots. I was also told that you can store some new spuds in a large tin in sand so you have homegrown new spuds on christmas day but not tried it yet - hopefully will this year though. Good luck!

have a look at this video here. We got some potato growing bags from Wilkinson but a sturdy compost bag is apparantly good as well. Good luck.