The gardener's calendar

Val looks at why we sow and plant crops on certain days

- Val Bourne

BY the end of January, the days are long enough to allow me a daily spell in the garden after I’ve finished at my desk. My early potatoes are already in their egg boxes, gently chitting in the cool porch. However, I won’t plant these frost-tender beauties until about 10 April. If I plant my potatoes any earlier, they are likely to get frosted, the foliage will blacken and they may even turn up their toes for good.

There is a long tradition of planting potatoes on Good Friday, and even when I was a child in the 1950s this was taken as gospel. I lived in suburban London and we generally got away with it, although if a frost was forecast we used weighted-down newspapers – the 1950s version of horticultural fleece – to keep the potatoes safe.

Planting on Good Friday must have been trickier in the heartland of England, as the lowest winter and early spring temperatures are generally recorded at RAF Benson in Oxfordshire. The whole idea of planting potatoes on Good Friday is religious superstition dating from Elizabethan times. This nutritious food