Chitting

Start chitting your seed potatoes on Tuesday 19 February 2019, this will take about two weeks.

Chitting will speed up the ageing process of your potatoes, by exposing them to light and, more importantly, a bit of warmth. This will cause the eyes of the seed potato to start sprouting and should result in a better crop.

Planting

Tuesday 5 March 2019

All schools taking part in the GYOP competition will be planting on this date to give them 14 weeks to grow a successful crop before harvesting.

By now, you should by now have chitted your potatoes but don’t worry if not, you can still plant them, just be extra careful not to over water them before they have had a chance to get established.

Also, don’t forget to label your grow-bags to help identify the variety growing. You could win a prize for your school by showing us how you labelled your bags.

Growing

14 weeks from planting to harvesting.

To grow a successful crop of potatoes in your grow bags, your potatoes will need: light, water, food, space and air.

Make sure you find the perfect spot to stand your bag, keep the soil moist but not wet and don’t forget to top up your soil as the plant grows, to give the potatoes plenty of room.

Watch out for late frosts too, potato plants hate frost!

Harvest

11 June 2019

Now is the exciting time when you find out if all of your hard work has paid off, just 14 weeks since planting.

If you remove the green tops from your plants, it makes them easy to pull out of the bag without damaging them, this means you can re-use the bags to grow something else.

Once out of the bags, the fun begins; roll up those sleeves and rummage through the soil to find your potatoes, just watch out for the mother tuber!!

Competition

All entries for GYOP 2019 must be entered before Friday 21 June 2019

Don't forget to keep your two crops separate and weigh them separately once you have washed the dirt off. Remember also, you must weigh your potatoes in grams

• Submit the weight of your Rocket crop
• Submit the weight of your Regional crop
• Submit the weight of your largest individual potato (any variety)
• Submit the number of potatoes in a crop from a single variety

For the competition rules click here