There is a long tradition in Irish gardens of having the seed potatoes in the ground by Patrick's Day, and it is a tradition rooted in good sense. The seventeenth of March sits at the point in the year when soil temperatures are beginning to lift and the worst of the winter wet is, in most years, starting to ease. A seed potato in the ground at that point has every chance of establishing well and producing a strong early crop. The difficulty is that in the kind of springs we have been having in recent years, the seventeenth of March arrives and the ground is so saturated that planting is simply not possible. The question then is not how to plant in wet soil but whether to plant at all, and if so how to manage it.

The short answer is that you cannot plant seed potatoes into waterlogged soil and expect them to perform. A seed potato sitting in ground where there is no air in the soil, where water is at or near the surface and the temperature is still low, will rot before it ever shoots. This is not a question of variety or preparation. It is a fundamental issue of conditions. A potato needs oxygen at the root zone, it needs a soil temperature of at least seven degrees to begin developing, and it needs enough structure in the soil around it to allow water to drain away after rain rather than sitting permanently. None of those conditions exist in waterlogged ground. Planting into it is not planting late, it is simply losing your seed potatoes to rot.

The variety distinction matters enormously here and it is where many people make the situation worse than it needs to be. Your early varieties, the ones people most associate with the Patrick's Day tradition, things like Home Guard, British Queen and Orla, are the ones most affected by a delayed spring. These are the varieties you want to be eating in June and July, and if they go in late they come out late. With early varieties, every week of delay at planting time is broadly a week's delay at harvest. That is frustrating but it is manageable, and the honest advice is to wait until the soil is workable and plant them then rather than forcing them into ground that will destroy them. Your main crop varieties, the ones you are growing to store and use through autumn and winter, are under far less time pressure. Main crop potatoes can go in well into May and in a difficult season even into early June. A seasoned grower once told me his father planted his main crop on the sixth of June and had a perfectly good harvest. The calendar is a guide, not a deadline.

If the ground is persistently wet and you have early varieties that need to go in, there are two practical approaches worth considering. The first is to improve the planting pit directly. Digging the trench or pit deeper than you normally would and backfilling the base with grit, sharp sand and good free-draining compost before placing your seed potato creates a localised drainage pocket that keeps the immediate environment around the tuber drier than the surrounding ground. This is not a permanent fix for a drainage problem but it gives your potatoes a fighting chance in a difficult season. The second approach, and the more reliable one for anyone with genuinely poor drainage, is to grow in raised beds or large containers. A raised bed filled with a light, free-draining compost sits entirely above the waterlogged ground. It warms up faster in spring, drains freely after rain, and gives you full control over the growing environment regardless of what the weather is doing. Adding biochar to the compost mix significantly improves both drainage and nutrient retention, which matters particularly in a container or raised bed situation where the growing medium has to do more work than open ground.

There is one further issue specific to recent Irish springs that is worth being aware of. The wet autumns and difficult harvesting conditions of recent years caused a significant crop failure in seed potato production, both in Ireland and in Holland, which supplies a large proportion of the seed potatoes sold in Irish garden centres. As a result, availability of popular early varieties including Home Guard has been reduced. If you are finding that your preferred varieties are sold out or difficult to source, this is the background reason. It is worth checking with your local garden centre early in the season and being prepared to consider an alternative variety if your first choice is not available. Most good early varieties will perform comparably once conditions allow, and being flexible about variety is far less costly than being rigid and ending up with nothing in the ground at all.

The broader principle at work here is one that applies across the vegetable garden. Working with the conditions you have rather than against them is almost always the more productive approach. A garden with difficult drainage is not a failed garden. It is a garden that needs a different strategy, whether that is choosing plants suited to wet ground, building raised growing areas, improving soil structure over time, or simply learning to read the conditions and wait for the right moment rather than following a date on a calendar. Improving soil structure in vegetable beds over winter with organic matter, grit and biochar means that when spring does arrive and conditions allow, your ground is ready to receive seed potatoes quickly rather than needing further preparation at the busiest time of year.