Planting ‘First Earlies’ in Potato Planters

It’s time to get the potato planter out and the potatoes into place. Remember to ‘chit’ them before planting in our Potato Growpots.

This month, we wanted to show you the first stage of getting your Potato Planter ready and the seed potatoes planted ready for an early crop.

The first stage is to get your Potato Growpot out and ready for use. Clean it up if you need and remember, to start with, we only need one of the pots to get the first four seed potatoes into place.

 
Stack them to check everything is OK, so you can see how they slot together. As the potato plant grows, you are going to add the next layer to build it up. As shown above, eventually we will get to three pots tall.

The next thing is to ensure there is a hardcore/shingle base to allow for drainage. Just grab some stones and place them into the bottom of the first pot. *Fix the first pot onto the base and then add the shingle.

Next, fill the Potato Planter with soil, ready to place your seed potatoes. Ideally, you need to be half-filling the first pot with a suitable potting compost.

You can now place 4 or 5 seed potatoes, evenly spaced as shown above. Remember, to ‘chit’ the potatoes before you do this. Read more about ‘chitting potatoes‘ here.

We advise 4 as shown above, although no reason why you can’t add a 5th into the middle.

Cover the seed potatoes with approximately 12cm of extra compost to bring the soil close to the top of the pot. The idea is to make the shoots search for light and grow up. As they approach the surface, we move to stage 2 and build up the soil layer to provide more room for the potato plant to grow.

The final stage, for now, is to ensure that you water the potato grow pot in both the centre area and outer rim, so that water soaks down into all areas of the soil.

We will expand this post as the earlies progress showing you each stage of the process and how we add the 2nd and 3rd tie of the Potato Planters.

It’s April and it’s ideal for you to get started. If you haven’t ordered your Potato Planters yet, click here