Spuds for 2010

About the only thing I can be sure of in 2010 is that I will still be eating more potatoes than usual. If nothing else they are easy to maintain if I can't do the usual intensive daily horticultural routine.

This year's spuds are already beginning to sprout (Nicola is the worst), despite the recent cold weather so good winter dormancy is something I'll be looking for in addition to blight resistance. Lady Balfour has exceptional dormancy, in addition to overall suberb disease resistance, so I'll give this a go (helped in my decision by T&M offering free postage even on heavy items over xmas)

I'd already decided on Setanta as a replacement for Rooster, and again it supposedly combines good storage qualities with greater disease resistance than it's parent, but retaining a similar dry, floury texture (I hope...)

I might try a row of Nadine just for exhibition purposes, also perhaps Romano and Picasso so that all categories are covered (with the cup in mind). I'll save my own seed of Nicola too.

Potato varieties - some further thoughts.

I had considered finishing with Nicola now that blight has started affecting us regularly, but its resistance to slugs and scab is good, problems are actually greater evils as far as storage and general usefulness. As long as action is taken early enough, it seems cutting foliage/strawing down do stop the blight from affecting the crop or and the yields isn't actually affected as badly. I have tried Sante in the past but I didn't rate the culinary quality, the yields weren't spectacular either and I didn't find the disease resistance any better than Nicola, though obviously the latter is more susceptible to blight. A possible alternative is Charlotte, which is a similar type of potato with a similar season and slightly better blight resistance, but less versatile than Nicola, with a smaller average tuber size.

The only other second early/maincrop I've ever liked was a round, purple-eyed variety whose name I forget. This was the highest yielding potato I've ever grown, but it simply couldn't find it after a couple of years. I think it must have been Picasso. Whether it would be as good in this location I don't know, its susceptibility to slugs might be a bit disappointing.

Potato crop: Nicola

Dug the remaining rows of Nicola today. Exceptionally clean crop this year with very little slug damage and only a tiny bit of scab.

Yield was a little less than the Rooster, 7 kg for two rows (6  or 7 tubers) but size was good, with a number of perfect tubers of fist-size for  baking. Most of the spoiled tubers were fork-damaged. Only one plant had blighted tubers. Considering how early blight struck this season, we were lucky to have any potatoes to store at all.

I think it is definitely worth getting seed in as early as possible. The first two rows of Nicola went in a couple of weeks before Easter, and were large, fully leafed plants whilst the later sowings were just breaking.

This is the potato council's evaluation of Nicola:

"Second early maturity, high number of uniform tubers per plant, medium to long dormancy. Good resistance to common scab, potato leaf roll virus, potato virus Y and bruising. Resistant to potato cyst nematode Ro1. Medium low dry matter, good boiling qualitities" Potato Council website

Best of all, no damage done to any toads today. I did see a grass snake tail slipping silently away as I cleared the straw, maybe the toads have all been eaten.

Not sure why these won a prize, they look dreadfully uneven!

Potato: Nicola - with no scab

A very clean crop of Nicola, about 1Kg from one of the later sown tubers. This year I treated the ground with sulphur powder at the rate of 15g metre before sowing. So far it seems to have done the trick, not a trace of any scab, though Nicola isn't the most scab-prone of potatoes but it does sometimes show some brown scarring where earth has attached in a lump. I'm even hopefully the early-sown ones might yield some large and clean enough for exhibiting at the Autumn show. I'll reserve judgement until I harvest some of the Rooster which were quite badly affected by scab last year.

Nicola is my favourite potato as it is so versatile. A salad type second early, it can be used early (after flowering) as a new potato, or left to attain a larger size as maincrop as it stores very well. It has dense, yellowish flesh with a lovely buttery flavour. It has smooth, fine skin and isn't as prone to scab in my soil as some varieties. It's slightly less prone to slugs than some, perhaps because it is denser. Larger tubers bake well too, though be very careful to look for any tiny slug holes before baking. I'm going to miss this variety; I'm not sure I can bring myself to use dithane to control blight.

It scores 3/9 for Blight resistance, 7/9 for scab and 8/9 for potato eelworm.

Blighted!

Returned from Wales to find all the potato crop badly affected by blight. Fortunately the infection was still on the leaves, and hadn't spread down the stems to the tubers (as far as I could see) so there was a hope of saving the crop. Fortunately I had been earthing up very assiduously which would help stop infection spreading to surface tubers.

The only way to save the crop was to remove the haulms at soil level and destroy them. I dusted the ground with some Bordeaux powder and slug pellets then covered the ground with at least 6 inches of straw (to cover the pellets from birds and act as a barrier to spores. I've just dug some Nicola, and this approach seems to have words.

This is the first time in more than twenty years of gardening in Oxford that I've had potatoes affected by blight, though outdoor tomato crops have always been affected from mid-August onwards. I had one plant affected last year, but the rest of the crop was unaffected. Sadly my favourite potato variety Nicola has little resistance to blight. The other bed of Rooster was also affected. I'm really glad I experimented with planting early, a couple of weeks before Easter. This meant the early tubers made a lot of early growth and the haulms were twice the size when blight struck; this certainly seems to have a more or less doubled the yield between the early and late-sown rows (though I didn't have time to weigh the crop unfortunately).

Now that blight is well and truly established in the garden, I will have to choose blight-resistant varieties.  T&M claim their maintcrop variety Sarpo Mira has 'unprecedented blight resistance'; I might give it a go and report back.