Potatoes for clay soil

soupdragon10

I have a clay soil and have tried growing potatoes with varying success over the past couple of years. Varieties have tended to be what was available at the local garden centre.

Can anyone advise me about good varieties for a heavier soil please. I'm looking for earlies and second earlies (as I live in Cornwall I've avoided manicrop as I've been told that we get blight early due to wet conditions here).

Ideally multi purpose varieties that I can boil, mash etc would be ideal.

Rummer

Hmmm not to sure, we have really heavy clay soil and have put a variety of potatoes in that have all grown well and improved the quality of our soil. We order ours from Alan Romans maybe you could contact them and ask?

[Deleted User]

I have had very successful results in heavy clay. Lady christi, charlotte, cara. Other allotmenteers have also had good results with all their varieties. Maybe it is down to something else rather than the soil

kandyfloss

Any potato variety will be good for clay soils as it is the action of earthing up,and harvesting the crop which helps break up the soil plus the action of frosts in the winter months.

Any wood ash that you can incorperate into the soil will also help tp break up clay soil as well as as much compost you can get into the soil over the Autumn and winter months.

We have a rotavator and using that on the clay will help break down the clay particles but it has taken us a few years to get the soil into a nice crumbly texture:)

Sambucus_Nigra

How are you actually growing them? For heavy clay soils, we just use a bulb planter to pop the seed potatoes in, with a little organic potato fertiliser in each hole before the potato goes in, cover back with the soil plug - and then earth up if you can, or mulch with straw. cardboard etc if the clay is too hard to earth up. Don't let them dry out in the spring, sprinkle some potato fertiliser on the soil before earthing up around the end of May and water in well; and make sure you don't harvest them too early! You can furtle and take spuds from under the ground for weeks without digging the plant up.

The main thing I've found is to choose varieties that are eelworm resistant. We grow Kestrel, Amorosa, Charlotte and Mr Little's Yeltolm Gypsy; with Mayan Gold but these are lates so not good for Cornwall [unless you get them in really early].

Jnelhams

There is a most delightful film called "Grow your own" during which one of the children help a Chinese boy and his sister tend their father's rather unpromosing allotment. Anyway, the technique they use was an interesting one, they simply dug a hole with a hand trowel just deep enough to plant the potato and covered with old cardboard and then black plastic cutting slits. This the children were told would stop the weeds and mean they would not have to dig the ground and produce a crop of potatoes with little effort.

It is a method that does do very well on heavy clay, although you can't bank on too heavy a crop it does get the ground dug for free.

Worth trying to see the film, it has some fine acting and a good story.