Potato Day Pops Up

GARDENERS’ high street favourite to start the growing season with may have disappeared but now there’s an alternative pop-up shop with one of its seasoned managers. 

Self–proclaimed Potato Day assistant Keith Hillier, formerly of Wilko, donates one day a year of his time to selling seed potatoes at the popular annual event run by Transition Loughborough at John Storer House 

Mr Hillier opened the latter – day Wilko branch in Loughborough after joining the store in 1991 and managed it for years spending 28 years with the iconic chain.  

He said it may have gone but he can still sell high quality Scottish seed potatoes for chitting on annual Potato Day with the environmental group, part of a network of towns seeking local, sustainable solutions to the climate and energy crises. 

“The quality’s very good and you can buy individual tubers to try out certified virus – free from across several varieties including sarpo mira, pink fir and kestrel,” said Mr Hillier. 

This year the group sourced in bulk with Chesterfield to reduce costs.  Customers collect pre–ordered green manure as well as broad beans, to replace those rotted and washed away by this year’s floods and garlic if it’s failed to vernalise, a process to start flowering requiring long cold spells.  

Volunteer Jon Knight said it’s about increasing the resilience of the town in the face of threats from changing weather patterns. 

“Potato Day offers more sources and more options to increase your own supply. If you can grow potatoes you’re more resilient,” said Mr Knight. 

“Climate change over the last one hundred years is happening much more rapidly than before and energy-related greenhouse gas CO2 emissions show on graphs as sharply rising since the ‘50s,” said Mr Knight. 

The Keeling Curve plots the increase in concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere since 1956, demonstrating it has risen every year, attributable to the rise in the use of fossil fuels.   

“Many people might think climate change is about the polar bears suffering from melting ice caps rather than the effects on supply to get strawberries into your fridge but, like the farmers, gardeners also face problems from extreme weather.” 

“The warm and wet weather is for example increasing fungi and pests from the Mediterranean such as box blight and box caterpillars,” he added.