Future potato planning

There is a knack to selecting the best potatoes for next year's planting. Bob reveals which tubers to keep

- Bob Flowerdew

THERE’S a common error that many of us make when growing potatoes. Quite sensibly, we want to save our own small tubers or ‘sets’ to plant next spring, and we are likely to be careful doing so. If we suffer blight or other obvious problems, we will probably buy fresh stock. But there’s an invisible threat that we might overlook.

We’ve all heard the warning to save only from healthy-looking, productive plants. In practice, we tend to eat and store larger spuds, throw away the obviously rotten, green, tiny and misshapen crops, and save the small, egg-sized tubers for our sets.

This is fine – if we do so once. Consider if we grow, say, 50 sets into 50 plants each year. If we kept one small set from each for the following year, there’d be little problem. Now, if one plant threw more than half its crop (say, five of eight) as small tubers, that would not matter much, either.