Gayton-based gardener Jamie Marsh on winter weather and starting his potato crop

In his weekly Jamie’s Little Allotment column, Jamie Marsh discusses the seasons and starts the year’s potato crop…

I know we all say it every year, and why it shocks us bewilders me, but aren’t the nights pulling out now? I was outside the other day and looked at my watch and it was 5.33pm. I turned to my wife and said: “Look how light it still is.” Spring is actually coming.

I don’t know about you, but I really get a lift when I realise winter is nearly over. Not that I think we’ve had much of a winter to be honest. Without the risk of me sounding like my dad, and saying, it really hasn’t been like the winters I remember.

I can count on one hand how many proper frosts we’ve had, and snow, apart from a brief flurry last weekend, has been nonexistent.

You might think we don’t want the cold and the frost but I know but the garden needs a cold winter period to help it function as it should. Some of our best-loved plants and flowers need a period of cold to break the dormancy of seeds or promote germination - this is called cold stratification.

The cold temperature breaks down the seed coat and allows water to enter the seeds left behind from last year’s annuals.

Some of our best-loved wildflowers - yellow rattle, meadowsweet and primulas such as primrose and cowslip - all require repeated cold/thaw cycles to germinate, and biennials such as foxgloves flower better after a frosty winter.

But it’s not only the plants in the ornamental garden which need the cold, there are things in the allotment that need the cold as well.

Garlic needs a good cold period to make the single clove you planted split into the bulb with several cloves in. If we have a mild winter, there’s a high chance the garlic could stay as one large single clove.

One more thing a good cold winter with some hard, sharp frosts helps with is pests, namely slugs and snails. The frost will keep them in check and give us half a chance to grow something without it being munched.

On another note, I started chitting my seed potatoes this week. Chitting is a process we veggie growers do with our seed potatoes to get them ready for planting. You place your seed potatoes in a cool, frost-free, light place to promote the eyes or shoots to form - a windowsill is perfect for this.

Egg boxes are a great way of containing your seed spuds on the windowsill, but as we’ve got our own hens we don’t buy eggs, so in turn don’t get egg boxes, so I just used a seed tray and some scrumpled-up brown paper packaging. It works perfectly to just keep them in one place.

In four or five weeks’ time you should have some lovely little shoots roughly 2-3 cm long, perfect to be planted in the ground.

When I explain to some people about chitting, they ask me why we do it and wouldn’t it be better in a dark cupboard for the shoots to grow, because when they retrieve a stray spud from the back of the cupboard, it’s usually got really long shoots on it. However, those dark shoots are searching for the light which makes them long, weak and spindly. We want the short strong shoots to get our spuds growing well.

Another question I get asked is why do it? There’s really only one reason for chitting and that’s to give the potato plants a head start. If we didn’t, it would take several weeks under the ground to get to the same stage. I’ll let you know how they are doing in a few weeks.

As always you can email me at Jamieslittleallotment@gmail.com with any questions or just to let me know what you’ve been up to in the garden. You can also see what I’m up to in the garden by following me on Instagram: @ jamies_little_allotment