Our guide to Chitting Your Potatoes
So, you’ve ordered your potatoes and they’ve now arrived, but what’s the next step?
We thoroughly recommend chitting your potatoes – this is a way of starting the growth process of your seed potatoes before they get put in the ground, and it helps them to be more robust and disease-resistant whilst reducing their growing time.
Early varieties of potato especially benefit from this process, and we suggest chitting all of your potatoes. Chitting creates strong, hardy sprouts and brings your seed potatoes out of dormancy, creating sturdier plants and quicker, more plentiful yields.
Typically, you want to chit your potatoes around 6 weeks before you plan on planting them.
Take your seed potato and look for the end with the most eyes as this is where the sprouts will form.
Put it in an eggbox with the eye-end facing upwards and leave it in a light, warm (around 10°C), frost-free area like a greenhouse, a porch, or a windowsill.
You can also scrunch up some newspaper and put that into a seed tray, using the paper to keep the potatoes in an upright position.
Your potatoes should develop small (around 2.5cm) green/purple coloured sprouts; if the sprouts are pale and long, it means the potato has been in an area that was too dark for the chitting process to be successful.
When you’re ready to plant your chitted potatoes, you can choose to remove some of the sprouts to help with your harvest – the more sprouts your potato has, the smaller your spuds will be. 3-4 sprouts is enough to produce a good-sized crop. To remove the extras, either rub them off carefully or take a sharp knife and cut them to stop them from re-sprouting.
Our top tip at this stage is to handle your chitted potatoes like eggs – whilst they are robust and produce stronger plants, the sprouts themselves are very delicate and easy to knock off! Make sure you place them carefully in the soil sprout-side-up to avoid any breakages. Different types of potatoes will have slightly different planting instructions, so be sure to check out the cultivation advice on all of our listings.
And there you have it – our quick guide to chitting potatoes to help you get prepared for the season. Not sure which potatoes to grow? Check out our blog about potato types here.
