Gardening Together with Diarmuid Gavin episode 5: This week, Diarmuid helps design a garden for Shane Auliffe in County Kerry, who wants to see a formal, grand garden from his window. He offers advice for gardeners with a bit of help from Mount Stewart head gardener Neil Porteous and shows viewers how to transform a terrace area as he makes the finishing touches to his own garden.
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Diarmuid Gavin invites viewers into his own garden paradise, encouraging everyone across the country to get gardening together. He takes calls, answers questions and offers dozens of great practical tips.
Gardening Together with Diarmuid Gavin episode 5
How to grow potatoes
Potatoes are hugely versatile and a staple ingredient of many meals in one form or another – boiled, mashed, chipped or baked. Potatoes are classified as being either earlies or maincrops. Early varieties are ready to harvest much sooner than maincrops and are what we call ‘new potatoes’. Maincrop varieties are in the ground a lot longer. They have a better yield and produce larger potatoes.
Potatoes are grown from special ‘seed’ potatoes (also called tubers). These are just like potatoes you buy from the supermarket, but they’re certified virus-free. Buy seed potatoes from late winter onwards. You start them off indoors by setting them to sprout, before they are planted.
It’s important with earlies and a good idea with maincrops to ‘chit’ the seed potatoes first before planting; this means allowing them to start sprouting shoots. Stand them rose end up (the rose end is the one with the most small dents in the skin, or ‘eyes’) in egg boxes or similar in a light, frost-free place. The potatoes are ready to plant when the shoots are about 3cm (1in) long. On early potatoes, rub off the weakest shoots, leaving four per tuber.
