Potatoes:- Salads v The Rest

Monday was a mostly dull day with a few sunny spells developing in the evening.

Last Saturday I dug up the first row of potatoes from what might be described as our main potato bed.

This is our main bed back at the beginning of July with all the varieties growing well. Now that the tops have started to die back I've started lifting the potatoes ready for winter storage. The first ones to be lifted were a row of Winston which is the row on the extreme left of the picture. The weight of the crop as lifted came to 13.34kg and I was rather pleased with the crop.

I've now sorted the crop into perfectly sound potatoes and those not so sound. I’m not quite so impressed by the crop now. 6.95kg of the harvest have gone into the damaged pile that’s fractionally over 50%. Most of the damaged potatoes just have small holes in them which I’m putting down to wireworm damage. The holes are small so I don’t think slugs are the cause of the damage.

This was the heap of damaged potatoes. I must be honest a couple were my fault as I rather enthusiastically speared a couple as I was lifting the roots. I’m amazed by how far away from the main haulms some potatoes grow. 

Now a few years ago I only grew salad potatoes on two grounds. Firstly we like waxy more than floury potatoes and secondly I sort of had a gut instinct that on the plot salad potatoes for whatever reason suffered less damage from wireworms and slugs. So I might check all the other varieties growing in our main bed and see if the weights of damaged v sound potatoes backs up my gut instinct.

I’m planning to gradually work through the bed lifting the potatoes row by row. So the order following on from Winston will be Nadine, Harmony, Charlotte and Nicola. Based on my instinct I’d expect Harmony to have more damage than the other varieties still to be lifted.

Time will tell.

Copyright: Original post from A Gardener's Weather Diary http://ossettweather.blogspot.co.uk/ author M Garrett