Welcome to Grow Your Own Potatoes
Whether you are taking part in GYOP with your school or just looking for information about potatoes for your class, you will find everything you need.
Harvesting for this year's GYOP project is fast approaching, it's almost time for the fun part and getting your hands dirty.
Here are 3 easy steps to help you with harvesting:
Step 1
Gently cut away and remove the green tops from your growbag.
Step 2
Grab the remaining stems and pull the plant from the grow bag.
Step 3
Carefully rummage through the soil and roots to find your potatoes, watch out for the mother tuber!!
For more top tips visit the harvesting page. Once you have harvested don't forget to enter your weights into the competition you could win a prize for your school, for the heaviest weight in your region or even nationally.
Please remember that this year it has been necessary to replace Rocket as the National variety and instead ALL schools received Casablanca for the competition nationwide, plus a regional variety, depending on where you are in the country.
I hope you have been following and getting the most from the NEW 6 week block of work developed to support the project between planting and harvesting. The next few weeks of the block of work are designed to introduce students to some useful kitchen skills.
Not all schools are lucky enough to have cooking facilities for students, this potato salad recipe is designed in a way that any school can make use of it. Hopefully when you harvest your crop you will have enough potatoes for everyone to create their own potato salad. If you don't have facilities in school to cook your potatoes, why not cook them at home and bring them into the classroom along with a few simple ingredients like peppers and onions.
Keep in touch
We would love to hear about your Grow Your Own Potatoes experiences. Share your pictures - Twitter @potatoes4school Facebook @potatoesforschools or on our new Instagram page @growyourownpotatoes and don't forget to tag us #GYOP.
Register
Registrations for 2021 are CLOSED
Sign up NOW for GYOP 2022
Please note: There seems to have been some confusion when ordering kits. As in previous years, if you would like to receive more than one FREE growing kit for your school in 2022 (up to a maximum of 4 per school) you will need to register separately for each kit. You will also need to use a different email address for each registration.
Please be aware that ONLY Primary schools in England, Scotland and Wales (5 to 11 year-olds) are eligible to take part in the GYOP project and will be allocated kits.
Chitting
Start chitting your seed potatoes on Tuesday 16 February 2021, this will take about two weeks.
Please note: If chitting day falls in your half term holiday don't forget to leave your seed potatoes on your chitting tray (built into your kit box) in a warm place, before you break up.
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 2 March 2021
All schools taking part in the GYOP competition will be planting on this date. This year you have 15 weeks to grow a successful crop before harvesting on Tuesday 15 June 2021
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.
Growing
15 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
Tuesday 15 June 2021
This is the exciting time, when you find out if all of your hard work has paid off, just 15 weeks after 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 2021 must be entered before Friday 25 June 2021
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
Featuring
Change to National variety for 2021
New 6-week block of work LIVE
