Moon-planting

I've spent an enjoyable afternoon ordering my seed potatoes and checking out blogs about allotments. There are a large number of such blogs (there's even a little Google Maps mashup of where some of them are on the Allotments-UK site). I've never grown potatoes before - the picture below shows the extent of the growing area that I tended in Sale, which explains why. So I was looking for tips on potato cultivation.

"Plant potatoes on Good Friday" was something that came up a lot. Well, that might be possible in the UK, but I'm blowed if I'm going to dig through the snow to do that here. I wondered if this tradition might be related to the moon phases - since Easter Sunday is the first Sunday following the full moon after the Spring Equinox. But after reading up on the matter, advice about moon-planting of potatoes seems contradictory: a New York Times article from 1991 makes this point too. So maybe I won't bother waiting for a full moon and will go by the soil temperature instead!

I had no idea how many seed potatoes to order, so have probably ordered either far too many or far too few - time will tell.