The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Growing => Vegetables => Topic started by: Odin on January 03, 2012, 06:03:03 am
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Digging spuds on New years day in the rain. Too wet for tractors so its back to more traditional methods.
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Water logged area , potato freeze to the right, almost impossible to walk in.
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Odin, the spuds look lovely. Its making me fancy jacket potatoes for tea :D
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What variety are those?
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Odin, the spuds look lovely. Its making me fancy jacket potatoes for tea :D
Mmmm Jacket potatoes. :yum:
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Most of them in the photo are Wiljur. According to the 'spec-sheet', they are 2nd early. There is plenty written about them but I understand that they are a Dutch variety. That day was heavy rain and they were thick with mud, but after a good hour in the rain, the coats look good. However they are now taking a lot more peeling with more eyes. The strange thing is, and I will stand corrected on this, despite the plants being dead since October, they are getting bigger? I am sure that they are still growing. That yellow tub holds 16kg. In ten yards it filled up twice.
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I like Wilja, nice tasting and good all rounder - and everything seems to get blight these days :( (at least in my garden) Just cut the haulms and leave for a while before harvest
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the sarpo types are very blight resistant and are tasty.
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the sarpo types are very blight resistant and are tasty.
that's interesting - I have tried several of their varieties but found them singuarly dry and lacking in flavour. Tried them every year since they came out, but not growing any at all this year. Which type do you grown?
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axona last year, and mira the yearr before, id agree that they arent as tasty as some varieties but ive struggled to get any decent crop of the tasty ones cos blight here in wet and humid cornwall wipes them out.
i suppose id prefer to put the effort in to get something rather than all that work for nothing!
the other advantage is they just keep growing and growing, i had some huge spuds by august last year.and the plants were still going in october.
as a test i grew another non resistant variety between the plants to see how they fared, they were dead by july and lifted to find just a few, allbeit tastier, spuds.
ill do the same this year for my maincrop, international kidney for treats till the blight hits.
as the sarpo range is new and still being developed im going to stick with them.
lawrence hills said that if the blight cycle could be stopped, that would be it broken, growing spuds that perpetuate blight keeps the cycle going.
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deepinthewoods,
We lived in Cornwall before we moved to France 5 years ago and ,among other veggies and fruit, grew spuds on a small scale to sell at a local country market.
I had a good rapport with Tuckers Seeds, my seed potato suppliers (I'm not talking about a massive order here) and I would email their potato department at the beginning of December and arrange for them to send out my seed potatoes as soon as they were in. I usually had them in January and would plant the lot, just as they came, without chitting to get them in early to beat the blight. We also invested in rolls of polythene to cover the emerging foliage from frost,........................... and blight periods.
The other thing that was of great us to us was this site;-
http://www.blightwatch.co.uk/content/bw-Home.asp (http://www.blightwatch.co.uk/content/bw-Home.asp)
The emails warning of a Smith period in our postcode area meant that we could roll out the rolled up polythene to protect our spuds beforehand.
Tomatoes, aubergines, and peppers were all grown happily in the old cowsheds.