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.