The Perfect Jacket Spud

I'm becoming obsessed with potatoes. I mentioned in an earlier post that I'm aiming to find the perfect jacket spud variety. Not just a potato which is suitable in size and fluffiness, but one that grows well on my patch, with few frailties in terms of pests and disease.

Utilising descriptions and characteristics from the British Potato Variety Database, plus some other online resources such as lovepotatoes, many faces of potatoes, and seed potato merchants JBA seed potatoes, among others, I've selected five varieties to go to war with for 2013, none of which I've tried growing in the past.

Second earlies;
Bonnie - detailed description here
Osprey - detailed description here

Maincrop;
Red King Edward - detailed description here
Markies - detailed description here
Pentland Squire - detailed description here

Potatoes!

As we await for their arrival, I have egg boxes put aside for when chitting* commences.

* But is chitting really necessary? The cynic in me reckons the seed companies just want to get shot of their seed potato stocks as soon as possible, so ship them out really early in the year. Far too early to plant, so what do we do with them?

'I know, tell them to stick them in egg boxes for weeks on end, until the ground and weather conditions are suitable for planting. Tell them it's called 'chitting' and it's a necessary part of planting potatoes'.

Yeah right, like anyone's going to fall for that load of nonsense :)

Talking Tatties

Spuds. If you’ve got an allotment, you almost undoubtedly grow them.

In our house we like jacket spuds, wedges and roast tatties the best. The perfect jacket spud variety, to my mind, is Cara. Big, round and fluffy. And you’ll generally find that if they do jackets well, wedges and roasties are a given.

But, what are they like to grow? I’ve had good results from Cara at the allotment, but in recent years, the harvests have been questionable. I think it’s mainly because they’re a late maincrop – being in the ground so long, they become more susceptible to slug and wireworm damage.

So my quest over the next few years is to find the perfect jacket spud. One that not only fulfils the obvious requirements of size and fluffiness, but also grows well and is less prone to damage and disease. My intention for 2013 is to do less quantities of one variety and trial a smaller amount of a few different ones.

This year, I relied solely on Kestrel. Notwithstanding the fact my spuds didn’t do great in general, Kestrel is not the one I’m looking for. We had some decent tubers, but they were too waxy to be perfect.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be researching online and perusing the seed catalogues to decide what to try in 2013. My pursuit of the perfect ‘spud-u-like’ starts here.