JANUARY is decision month when it comes to choosing seeds and most importantly, seed potatoes.

Do I want potatoes for baking, mashing or cold in salads? There are so many varieties to choose from with such wonderful names. You can choose from Sharpe’s Express, a heritage new potato variety first introduced in 1901, to contemporary varieties such as the blight resistant Sarpo Mira.

Last year I wasn’t very adventurous having lost some tubers to blight the previous two years. But apart from a late frost singeing the early potato leaves (they recovered well), the potato crop was unaffected, and we are still enjoying the stored crop of Valor, Cara and Setanta (with its lovely red skin and yellowy flesh). All three main crop varieties I grew have a certain degree of resistance to the dreaded blight, endemic in the south of England.

Blight is the scourge of potato and tomato growing in our increasingly wet summers. It is, in fact, a fungus that can be airborne, waterborne or can remain in soil that has been contaminated the previous year, making crop rotation essential. The trigger for blight is climatic and when temperatures are above 10 degrees centigrade with more than 90 per cent humidity, the conditions are perfect. Brown spots or welts spreading quickly over the leaves are the first sign. But I have found that if you cut off all the stems and foliage of the infected plants just above the soil surface, the fungus cannot spread down to the tubers, and crops have been saved.

Any blight infected foliage or tubers must be burned and not added to the compost heap otherwise you are just continuing the lifecycle of the fungus.

Enough gloom and doom, Hampshire potato days loom and they are great fun (details under green living in brief).

One of the joys of my annual trip to Whitchurch is being able to buy just one tuber of a particular variety if I want to, as they are generally sold as individual tubers. If I want to I can have a whole row of potatoes, each one a different variety.