In January one of the "wet day" jobs (we have lots of wet days) is checking over the seeds and planning the rotations in the potager. We'll then purchase or, as this year, order the seeds we need for the coming season. If we have a success with a particular variety of crop we tend to stick with it - conversely we've given up a number of crops because we can't get them to work.
So, our seed potatoes have just arrived and by a process of elimination we arrived last year at three varieties that worked well and produced a great yield of good quality potatoes. We will be growing Casablanca as our first earlies, Charlotte as our salad crop and Sarpo Mira as our maincrop, Sarpo Mira is a bit revolutionary here as it's a Hungarian variety that is "largely" resistant to blight - which is a big problem around us. It's also not, so far as I can find out, available in France so it's regarded with some suspicion by our neighbours.
Our stock came from Quickcrop which has a UK site but turns out to be an Irish operation from Sligo, we ordered some other items and they promised delivery in four days. We're pretty rural here so delivery promises need to be taken with a pinch of salt usually, but everything turned up on time, I got texts and emails from the delivery company (standard practice I know in the UK but first time that's happened to us here) and we got a 30kg package delivered for £10.
The first step is to lay the potatoes out for "chitting" - allowing them to develop shoots before planting:
They should be ready for planting in about four weeks, weather permitting.
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