Save your seed spuds

Save money and get a head start on next year’s potato stash by keeping your own seed spuds, says Bob

- Bob Flowerdew

IT makes so much sense to save your own potato sets to grow next year. Shop-bought bags of egg-sized potatoes are heavy and expensive to buy, while saving your own is dead simple. However, it’s vitally important to select only healthy sets. Obviously, any with much damage or any sort of rot are no good. Never save sets from sicklooking plants, especially when blight is around as they’ll carry it over.

A common mistake to avoid is selecting egg-sized tubers from the whole crop of a variety after this has been harvested. You see, if just one plant were to produce mostly smallish potatoes, then these would preponderate in that selection. Planting several such sets the next spring would multiply the damage, and in the third year one could have a bed of almost entirely mini-spud-producing plants.