Potato perfection

Toby considers his best options for garden-grown spuds and eagerly anticipates those first tasty beauties…

- Toby Buckland

WHEN ‘The Cod Father’, ‘Fishcotheque’ and the ‘Hippie Chippy’ takeawaysclosed during lockdown, potato-producing farmers had a surfeit of spuds that they sold at farm gates.

And that’s where my friend Caroline stumbled across a new (to her and me) variety, famed for its fried chip-shop crispiness and fluffy centres.

‘Sagitta’, as it’s known, has been a chippies’ go-to spud for years, but hasn’t made it to many veg plots where standard September croppers like ‘Maris Piper’ and ‘Cara’ are still firm favourites.

This reticence to grow a variety that so many eat for a treat could be due to gardeners sticking to what we know – or because commercial varieties, if available at all, don’t always succeed outside of mechanised farms where pesticides and fungicides are applied.

But what gardens lose against the homogeneous, sun-soaked and huge farm fields, they gain in other spud-growing advantages. Because jobs such as planting and lifting potatoes are done by hand, gardeners can grow a range of varieties in a small area, even pots, increasing the diversity of what we put on our plates and hedging bets against late cold snaps and wet summers.