Lone Kereru: The Not-So-Humble Spud

It's sometimes called "the humble spud" but there’s nothing very humble about this amazing vegetable! You can roast them, mash them, chip them, make them into salad and so much more. They’re tough, they’re versatile, they’re nutritious and often delicious.

Originating from the Andes in South America, where there are still thousands of varieties, the average person on Earth eats over 30 kg of these little beauties every year. Even the United Nations has called the potato a "hidden treasure".

Our first new potatoes of the season generally come out of the compost heap or some other part of the garden where a self-sown tuber or seed has flourished. To control the process yourself though it is best to set tubers out in trays a month or more before you wish to plant them. When they have a few strong, healthy shoots growing out of them they are ready to plant.

As a child I always remember my grandfather telling me, “Plant them lass, don’t bury them!” when he thought I was sowing something too deeply in the ground and that lesson has stayed with me all these years. I shallow plant nearly every seed I sow but you can safely go deeper with potato tubers.

You can place them in rows at a depth of around 4 inches but we’ve traditionally dug out a shovel full of dirt, thrown in a tuber with a handful of blood and bone fertilizer and put a shovel full of dirt back on top. This is an easy method with two people, one digging and covering and the other placing the tuber and fertilizer into the hole. If you get into a nice rhythm you can plant quite a lot of tubers in a fairly short time. A distance of about 30 cm or 1 foot between each potato is a good guide.

You can sow tubers from early spring all the way through late summer for early and main crops. With the seasons now being so unpredictable being “too early” or “too late” is often redundant these days as you can often get away with sowing earlier or later depending on what your weather is doing.

Well watered potatoes in good soil will yield crops as high as 3 to 5 kg (around 6.6 to 11 lbs) at our place which is an excellent yield. We’ve had single potatoes weighing over 1 kg (2.2 lbs) quite often.

Agria are one of many good varieties you can grow and a firm favourite of mine. Red potatoes often have prolific yields.

Generally speaking when the potato is flowering the tubers are still forming but I've sometimes found a mature enough potato plant, even if still flowering, will supply a reasonable quantity of early potatoes.

We’ve traditionally molded or earthed up potatoes 2 or 3 times as they are growing to cause more potatoes to form underground. This involves putting a mound or hill of soil around the base of the plant and can also protect the upper potatoes from greening which is undesirable as green potatoes can cause solanine poisoning and should not be eaten, potatoes being from the nightshade family.

One other thing to be careful of is not to overwater potatoes as too much moisture can cause them to rot in the ground. Potatoes do like water but I find a light watering three to four evenings per week is sufficient and does not waterlog them.

Potatoes are best dug carefully with a good garden fork like the one below. Starting at a reasonable distance away on an outer circle around the plant will help to avoid accidentally hitting tubers with the fork tines.

After harvesting the main crop before winter make sure the potatoes are completely dry before storing in cardboard boxes or hessian sacks.

Photos from our potato patch.