Although the weather's not as good as it was in the first couple of weeks of the month it's certainly not too bad for mid to late September.
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| Temperature & Rainfall Records for September 2016 |
I thought it was about time I dug up our last few potatoes on the allotment. This bed was planted up from the smallest of the seed potatoes left over when the main beds were planted back in April.
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| Planting Plan for Potatoes on Plot 28 |
Despite being planted late in the season they grew well as the photo below shows.
The rows run approximatively left to right across the photo and the first row in the foreground is Vales Sovereign so the varieties can be tied in with the plan at the top.
The Vales Sovereign have been a complete disaster and were devastated by blight. There were virtually no potatoes worth harvesting in the whole row. Most of the crop had turned to a brown mush in the ground.
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| Vales Sovereign |
This is how the potatoes that could be picked up and removed from the bed looked. Not a pretty sight. This was the first row I lifted so I wasn't holding out much hope for the rest.
Immediately next to the Vales Sovereign was a row of Nadine. Very surprisingly hardly any of this row showed any signs of blight when lifted. I was pretty pleased with the crop seeing as it had come from the smallest left over seed potatoes. Nadine is one of my tried and tested varieties over the years and doesn't normally disappoint.
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| Nadine |
At least this gave me a bit of encouragement to dig up a couple of more rows. Kestrel were the next couple of rows and these weren't too badly blighted either. There were a few potatoes that were clearly affected, and these were disposed of, but I'll need to keep a close eye on the remainder to see if they deteriorate in storage.
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| Kestrel |
So it would seem that some varieties of potatoes are more blight resistant than others. From this very non scientific test I'd suggest that Vales Sovereign have very little blight resistance with both Nadine and Kestrel standing up to blight rather better. It's a shame as the Vales Sovereign lifted a few weeks ago produced a good crop of potatoes but I won't be growing this variety again because of its susceptibility to blight.
I noticed in the evening as I was cataloguing my photographs using Lightroom that I'd logged my 300th harvesting photo.
I normally take one photograph of each of our harvests which is used in our harvesting records. The photo showing all our harvesting on Tuesday is below.
The potatoes in the small brown dish are all that I dared to save from the row of Vales Sovereign. We'll have to use them first rather than put them into winter storage.
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That's a nightmare! Vales Sovereign is permanently off my list too.
ReplyDeleteWhen I checked through our stored bag of Vales Sovereign half were consigned to the compost bin with blight. Never had any potatoes so badly affected by blight before.
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