Grow your own chips

Now is the time to start thinking about what you’d like to grow this year. I’m not talking about flowers, I mean food!

Garden centres have lots of seed packets on display as well as bags of seed potatoes, onion sets and even mushroom growing kits, just waiting for you to get growing.

Although it’s a bit too soon to start planting seeds in soil, you can at least get started on your potatoes.

Potato plants grow from seed potatoes, not ordinary spuds. Also known as tubers, these need to grow funny-looking sprouts before they are ready for planting.

Bags of seed potatoes can be bought from a garden centre or ordered online. There are three types of potato – first earlies, second earlies and maincrop. The earlies are ready earlier, obviously, and make tasty salad potatoes. The maincrop are ready to eat later and are the bigger potatoes that are good for roasting and baking.

Potatoes come in different varieties like ‘Desiree’, ‘Rocket’ and ‘Maris Piper, read the bag label to decide which you want to try.

Pick out a few tubers and place them in an egg box (you don’t need the lid) with the sprouty end facing upwards.

Leave the box in a cool light place for a few weeks to let the sprout shoots grow. This process is called “chitting”.