Are you chitting comfortably?

It's time to grow potatoes: Emma Cooper reveals the mysteries of making spuds sprout
Seed potatoes chitting
To chit or not to chit? Photograph: Emma Cooper

Guest blogger Emma Cooper, garden podcaster extraordinaire, knows a thing or two about growing potatoes. Here's her thoughts on the art and science of growing potatoes:

You may think growing potatoes is about as uncontroversial an activity as it's possible to find – but you'd be wrong. A debate rages every year over whether you should "chit" seed potatoes before planting them, or if you can just bung them in the ground.

For the uninitiated, chitting involves putting your seed potatoes somewhere light, cool, but frost-free for several weeks while they form short, sturdy shoots – instead of those long, spindly white ones that the spuds in the bottom of the cupboard grow when you've kept them too long.

On one side of the argument you have the experts (including Garden Organic) who encourage chitting, on the basis that it spurs seed potatoes into growth early and gives you a head start on the growing season. This is especially useful for early potatoes, which won't be in the ground for long. If your plot is prone to blight then it could also help you to mature a crop before the disease gets into its stride.

But arguments against chitting surface each year. It's possible that chitted potatoes, already in growth, will find the soil too cold when they're planted out – resulting in a "check" to their growth that slows them down. Unchitted potatoes would start sprouting in the cold soil and be a little less mollycoddled.

It's certainly true that your spuds will grow, chitted or not. Seed potatoes tend to be sold weeks before it's time to plant them, so chitting can just be a useful way of keeping them in good condition until the soil warms up. Beyond that, I imagine that the difference chitting makes depends on more variables than it's easy to take into account – potato variety, soil conditions, local climate, this season's weather, planting time and possibly even the phase of the moon. If you've been growing potatoes for years then no doubt you have a method that works for you. If you're new to vegetable gardening then try chitting your early potatoes and leaving your main crops to fend for themselves.

And if you really want to get a debate raging in the pub on the way home from the allotment, ask the old hands whether they recommend leaving all the shoots growing on their chitted potatoes, or whether they rub some off.