If the unpleasant winter weather is keeping you from gardening in your Lancashire home, why not take a green-fingered project inside?
If you have never planted your own potato crop but always wanted to, now is the perfect time to prepare your seed potatoes for planting.
BT.com explains that seed potatoes are easy to come by from garden centres and over the internet and early varieties of seed potatoes need to be chitted in January and February before they can be planted outside.
If you’ve never chitted a potato, you simply lay them rose end – the end with the majority of little sprouts – on newspaper in seed trays or in old egg cartons. Place them on a windowsill or in a frost-free greenhouse somewhere light – but not in direct sunlight.
In a matter of weeks, the shoots begin to grow, allowing the potatoes to strengthen up as it is still too cold for them to be planted outside.
Next, when they have grown to around an inch, rub away all but the four strongest sprouts and then you have completed their chitting.
It is recommended you do not plant your potato crop until the end of March and when you do, make sure the ground is prepared, loosening the soil and adding compost, working it into the soil.
You must look after your soil – especially when planting veggies. We recently reminded readers that the foliage from summer has now shed and rotted into the soil, and the worms in your garden are busy turning it into compost, ready for a bright green garden come spring.
