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Weekend jobs: choose, buy and chit your potatoes for an early crop

Eggboxes come in handy for chitting potatoes - www.alamy.com
Eggboxes come in handy for chitting potatoes - www.alamy.com

Pull your egg boxes out of the recycling, for it is time to chit your potatoes. Chitting is the method by which we encourage potatoes to sprout earlier than they naturally would: we start them now in the warm and plant them out when the season has thawed enough to pick up the baton. 

It brings a quicker and a bigger crop than you would get if you just popped them unchitted into the ground, and quicker can mean that you get a crop before blight kicks in. But first catch your tubers. 

There are lots in the garden centres at the moment and each year the range and diversity increases, but if you want a pick of the really choice varieties you will need to get yourself to a potato day. 

Search on Google to find potato days near you, or check out potato-days.net for events around the South West and London attended by potato specialist Pennard Plants. If you can’t get to any, then pennardplants.com is a potato cornucopia. 

The place to chit is critical: although it should be frost-free and offer enough warmth to get them going, it doesn’t want to be so warm that it encourages long, weak, etiolated shoots that will snap off easily. A porch, just-heated greenhouse or unheated spare room would be ideal, but a kitchen windowsill will do at a push. 

Rub off all but three of the “eyes” then prop up the spuds in their egg boxes with the eyes pointing upwards. Once the shoots have started to grow you can pot up a few tubers in large containers in the greenhouse, for particularly early crops, then keep the rest for outdoor planting in March and April.