Many kitchen gardeners value chitting practices while gardening experts view differ on the benefits of allowing green shoots to appear on seed potatoes before planting.
Chitting Homeguard Seed Potatoes February 2012. Photo credit: Susan Morris
Process of Chitting Seed Potato Varieties
Recent purchases of seed potato varieties are left in a light place with some warmth to kickstart the chitting process. The first sign of chitting is that substantial green shoots appear from the tuber which signals that the dormancy of the seed potato tuber has been shaken. Typically the chitted seed potato tuber is then planted outdoors in soil with the tuber sprout(s) facing upwards, or rose end to the sky.
Gardening experts argue that, once started, the chitting process does not stop with the planting of the seed potato tuber and that the premature aging means earlier senescence, dying of the plant leaves and a shorter growing season leading to poorer harvests of potatoes from a vegetable garden or allotment.
Gardening Expert View on Not Chitting Potato Seed Tubers
Alan Romans, merchant of specialist seed potatoes and writer/compiler of potato guides in his Alan Romans’ Guide To Seed Potato Varieties Fourth Edition (Alan Romans, 2008) argues “Chitting is not essential. It can bring crops forward but soil temperature at planting time can make more difference. I feel that a concept of appropriate ‘seed conditioning’ would be more helpful”.
In his expert guide, Alan Romans goes on to describe how stronger varieties would benefit from being prevented from chitting and how less robust varieties, particularly those that may have started chitting before purchase, may become more brittle before planting by the further chitting process by the home gardener.
Gardening Expert View on Chitting Potato Seed Tubers
In The Royal Horticultural Society book, Vegetable & Fruit Gardening The Definitive Guide To Successful Growing, edited by Michael Pollock (Dorling Kindersley, 2008) Guy Barter argues that chitting seed potatoes, if done correctly, can promote early growth, writing that once midwinter purchases of tubers arrive, possibly by mail order, “place them upright in trays, with the most eyes or dormant sprouts.. uppermost in a cool, frost-free, light place. They will send out healthy, short, green shoots… ideally 12mm (1/2 in) long. Kept in a warm, dark place, chits will be pale, weak and become too long.”
Keen gardeners with adequate space, enough time and inclination could set up their own home trials to test whether to chit or not to chit with the potato seed varieties that they like to grow. Bakestraw Garden-based experiments on growing potatoes have considered in earlier seasons the three varieties of Majestic, Mimi and Cosmos, under different seed and soil conditioning.
