Do you pre-spout your seed potatoes?

Are your window ledges covered with egg cartons full of seed potatoes? Why do we bother? Do you produce more resilient potato plants if you don't chit them? I have been doing a bit of digging.

Pre-spouting seed potatoes. I hadn’t really thought much about this and I, like most other gardeners, religiously chit my potatoes in February and March. So why do we chit potatoes and is this still the best advice in light of a changing climate?

Gardening wisdom states that chitting potatoes helps them to get off to a good start, so you get higher yields more quickly. That’s either more tubers, or fewer but bigger tubers.   

I did a bit of digging, looking at research papers, some from as long ago as the late 1940s. And the results were rather muddled. Some studies found that chitting boosted yield. Others found chitting produced faster early growth, but fewer stems and tubers. Some found chitting resulted in less scab. The results varied between varieties and between years.  In one study, the use of small seed potatoes produced tubers with a higher starch content which suffered from less blight, whereas the use of large seed potatoes resulted in faster initial growth, but the weight o…