Grow Your Own With Emmerdale - Week 1 - Potatoes

Emmerdale

Find out about our collaboration with Emmerdale, where we show you how easy it is to grow your own fruit and veg at home.

Week 1 - Potatoes

Our first video features the humble potato. Beloved the world over due to its culinary versatility, with it being used for pub favourite iterations of mash or fries, given a French twist in dauphinoise potatoes, or spiced up to make Aloo Gobi.

There are over 100 different potato varieties in existence, with an abundance of these available to grow at home. We've enlisted the help of Jonny McPherson, Emmerdale's own Dr Liam, and Elinor Leslie from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh to share their best tips and tricks for growing your own spuds. You'll be surprised just how easy it really is! Alongside the video, we've produced a fact sheet to help you grow your own at home.

Watch the video below to see how you can grow your own potatoes!

Interesting Facts

The slang term for potatoes, Spud, supposedly derives from a 19th century anti-potato activist group called The Society for the Prevention of an Unwholesome Diet, to keep potatoes out of Britain as they would threaten the interior wheat growing industry.

There are other theories, such as spud being the name of the digging tool used to uproot the potatoes, deriving from either the Dutch spjot (spear), Old Norse spjot (spear), or the Latin spad (sword).

Potatoes were popularised in France with their own guerrilla marketing campaign, where Antoine-Augustin Parmentier (a vocal promoter of the potato as a food source for humans in France and throughout Europe) placed armed guards around his potato fields while instructing the guards to accept bribes from people to allow them to "steal" the crop.

Potatoes are 80% water/ 20% solids

Potatoes contain almost all of the nutrients humans need to survive, with the Executive Director of the Washington State Potato Commission proving this by eating nothing but potatoes for 60 days.