I don’t know if you’ve ever paused to wonder how many potato varieties there are. Take a guess. Maybe 30? Or 50 if you count all those wierd knobbly heritage varieties?

Well I counted 128 on offer at the 12th annual Hampshire Potato Day, held in Whitchurch, near Andover, at the weekend.

There were French gourmet varieties like ‘Anais’ (first early) and Scottish stalwarts like ‘Kerr’s Pink’ (late maincrop). There were blue ones – ‘Edzell Blue’ (second early) and ‘Salad Blue’ (early maincrop) among others - pink ones (maincrop ‘Pink Fir Apple’)  and red ones: ‘Highland Burgundy Red’ (second early) has a red heart when you cut it open, which is intriguing but slightly unnerving.

There were very modern ones: ‘Sarpo Mira’ and ‘Axona’, maincrops bred in 2002 and 2003, have a deserved reputation for blight resistance; and very, very old ones – late maincrop ‘Fortyfold’ has been grown since 1836. I was very taken with this one as its knobbly tubers are bright purple with white blotches, but since it was bred about five years before blight began ravaging its way through potato growing everywhere (amazing to think there was a time when potato blight didn’t exist) I suspect it would be a martyr to the disease.

And that’s not even counting a number of varieties on display which are so rare there aren’t enough of them to sell, and as well as potatoes…. look, why don’t I stop going on and just let the pictures tell the story.

'Black Bishop Choir Boys' - super-rare and gets my prize for best name of the day	Another old variety so rare it's not sold but handed down through the generations
'Salad Blue', a good-looking Victorian variety which stays blue on cooking	Four double rows of potato crates stretching right across the hall offered a bewildering choice
It wasn't all potatoes though - veg displays and heritage seed merchants were there too	... and peas and beans by the half-pint, as well as onion and shallot sets galore

My haul at the end of the day was 10 tubers each of the maincrops ‘Majestic’ (Scottish, 1911), ‘Mayan Gold’ (yellow-fleshed, 2003), ‘Pentland Squire’ (all-rounder, 1970) and ‘Vitellotte’, a French potato dating back to 1875 which I’m very intrigued by as it’s dark purple, right down to the foliage, and the taste is said to be astonishingly good. I also snaffled some Broad Bean ‘Crimson Flowered’, a Jerusalem artichoke (of which more later) and – my find of the day – a yacon crown, courtesy of the wonderful specialist nursery Edulis.

Potato Days were started by Garden Organic, who still hold the biggest of all of them at Ryton, near Coventry. That’s a bit of a hike from my neck of the woods, so I just went to the nearest one: there’s a list of all the potato days held across the whole country here. They carry on well into March so there’s still plenty of time to go to one near you.