Get a room full of keen veg-growers together at this time of year, and sooner or later you can guarantee the talk will turn to whether or not you chit your potatoes.

It’s one of those pieces of wisdom that’s handed down unquestioned from gardener to gardener through the ages: when your seed potatoes arrive, you stand them up in a bright but frost-free place – not too warm though, and out of direct sunlight - with the end with the most ‘eyes’ (little tiny buds) uppermost. This, they say, encourages your spuds to form little sprouts, giving them a head start on the year.

When I first started growing veg I chitted my potatoes religiously every February: that’s what the books told me to do. Then one year I forgot. I couldn’t quite face chucking out a whole years’ worth of tubers, and if I waited another month to chit them it was going to be too late to plant them: so I thought what the hell, I’ll put them in anyway.

Result: bumper crop of spuds and you couldn’t have told the difference. A few years later I did the same thing again under trial conditions. Not quite to RHS standards, you understand, but I did scribble down what I did when and what happened next in a slightly muddy notebook.

I planted two lines of new potatoes next to each other, one chitted for a month from early February, the other planted straight into the ground from the packet. The chitted potatoes appeared above ground much sooner, and grew on more strongly to begin with: but by May the non-chitted spuds had caught up, and by harvest time you couldn’t have told the difference. What’s more, I weighed the crop I got: there was no more than a few ounces in it.

All this has firmly convinced me that you don’t actually need to chit potatoes.

Why, then, have I just painstakingly laid out my lovely selection of new, second-early and maincrop potatoes in eggboxes under the staging in my frost-free greenhouse?

Because if as most gardeners do you buy your seed potatoes a month or more before you’re intending to actually plant them, you’ll quickly discover that they start chitting themselves anyway. If you’re storing them in your shed in a netting bag while they’re doing this, the sprouts tangle themselves up with the netting, grow in all sorts of funny directions and by the time you get around to planting them are so pale and weedy that they snap off the moment you touch the seed potato (if you haven’t already snapped them all off getting them out of the bag, of course). Which is a big waste of potential potato plant if you ask me.

I lay my potatoes out anyway, just as you would if you were chitting them, so that they sprout more normally and are easier to handle come planting time. So in answer to your question: yes, I do chit my potatoes, but no, I don’t.