This grow-your-own favourite is easy and versatile, ideal for beginners, and harvesting is like digging for buried treasure. Potatoes aren’t just for large veg plots – you can grow a few plants in a small bed or large tub, and even grow a Christmas crop in a greenhouse.
Potatoes (Solanum tuberosum) are a traditional veg plot staple, easy and fun to grow, producing a plentiful crop in summer or early autumn. Whether you’re new to growing potatoes or have been doing it for years, digging up your buried bounty is always a thrill. And eating your first new potatoes of the season, steamed and served with butter or mint, is a highlight of early summer.

The humble spud comes in a surprisingly diverse range of varieties, offering gardeners a choice of flavours and textures not available to supermarket shoppers. Most varieties are classified as either earlies (new potatoes) or maincrops, depending on when they’re ready to harvest.

Potatoes are grown from specially prepared ‘seed potatoes’ (small tubers), usually planted in spring. With early varieties, the seed potatoes can be ‘chitted’ (or encouraged to sprout) before planting, to get them off to a head start and produce an earlier crop. As the plants grow, soil should be gradually piled up around the stems, known as earthing up, to bury the developing tubers.

If you don’t have room for a whole row of potatoes, you can grow just a few in a small bed or large container. You can even grow a winter harvest by planting in a large tub in late summer, then protecting the plants from frost in a greenhouse or sunny porch.

Potatoes are usually easy and reliable croppers, but they can be affected by several pests and diseases, the most notorious being the fungal disease blight. However, this is less likely to affect early varieties and is less prevalent in dry summers.