The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Growing => Vegetables => Topic started by: MAK on March 17, 2013, 01:17:43 pm
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I guess that the seed potatoes have been treated or grown disease free.
We have a lot of potatoes in the cellar still and it seems a shame not to plant the smaller ones.
Given that I have unintentionally grown potatoes in a compost heap from discarded kitchen potatoes my guess is that lasy years crop - if planted- should be OK.
Has anyone planted left over spuds or do you all buy seed potatoes?
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If you experienced any blight on the leaves (usually Second earlies) then it is possible that it has also reached the Tuber.
If you cut a couple in half and look for brown spotting then you have blight.
if you use these then you are re-introducing infected crops.
However some of my best crops are in an area that I no longer use and it is simply the small ones that are left in the ground from the previous year.
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I try to clear away any volunteer potato plants, for the reason Floyd gives, disease. Sometimes there's no problem but other times there is, not just with blight. As we live in Scotland where many seed potatoes are produced I would rather not be a source of disease problems for the producers. Volunteer tomatoes are even more of a problem, quickly spreading disease to new plants - I know this because I couldn't resist one year letting all those tomato plants which appeared in my polytunnel so nice and early grow, and ended up with a crop disaster.
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Difficult to know if we had blight as the Colarado beetle devasted the foliage if I missed cleaning off the pink/red grubs (horrible job). I will cut a few spuds to check for signs of blight but so far all we have eaten have been clean as a :innocent: (whistle).
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I cant risk not using seed pots as Im planting an acre of them this time but used to buy Charlotte from tesco when I had 2 allotments and was ok with it.