Page 12 - Simply Vegetables Summer 2023

Trying potatoes in coir
EMILY PLUMB FNVS
Given that peat and peat-based composts are due to become unavailable to amateur growers in the coming years, we thought we’d start experimenting with some of the peat-free alternatives that are on the market.
We popped into our local Morrison’s supermarket the other week and they had this Coco & Coir “CocoGrow” compost on offer – 2 boxes for £14. The box states that each block makes 75 litres of compost, so we didn’t think that was too bad price wise. Therefore, we bought a few boxes and are going to give it a try with a few different bits and pieces this season.
Our first experiment will be with potatoes. We were kindly gifted a pack
of seed potatoes by one of our Essex DA members at our March meeting. They had seen them in their local garden centre and picked a pack up for us to try because of the name of the variety – yes, that’s right, the potato is called “Emily”! We’ve had
the potatoes chitting in an egg box on the windowsill in the spare bedroom since March, and as you can hopefully see, they’ve got some pretty strong shoots on them now.
As with most of the potatoes we grow, we will remove all the shoots except one, leaving one of the strongest ones intact. We typically carve the other shoots out with a small knife so they are completely removed from the tuber, otherwise we find that they have a tendency to regrow once in the
compost which defeats the object. We find that removing most (typically only leaving one, or at most two) of the shoots results in few potato tubers being produced, but they tend to be larger. It’s not always the case, but usually!
Firstly, we had to prepare our coir for use. It comes in a dry block which in our case needed 25 litres of water added to it. We
used cold water which worked fine, but Mum and Dad had also bought some to try, and they added warm water to theirs (which it mentions you can on the box), and their block broke down more quickly using warm water than when we did it with cold water. Therefore, something to think about if you are in a real hurry, not that it took very long even with the cold water.
12 Simply Vegetables