[doug hutch]

hi all
       should my early potatoes grown in bags be lifted now  and stored in
        hessian sacks

[prakash_mib]

right,
dont know much about potatoes. but What I heard is earlies dont store. I am little surprised that you havent pulled the earlies earlier!! Mine went dead tops at the end of june.
pls wait for others to respond as well.

[Yorkie]

Prakash is right that earlies don't store as well as maincrop.

It's entirely up to you; if they're protected from slugs in the growing bags then I'd be minded to leave them there, cropping as and when you want.

[paintedlady]

yep, slugs are the biggest problem if spuds are left in the soil - last year I didn't get round to digging up all my Arran Pilots until end of September (once the season got going with lots of other things cropping or needed planting out, they weren't going anywhere so I abandoned them) and I was amazed that the spuds were fine, but yes, the slugs had got to quite a few too.

[solway cropper]

Hi Doug,

Unless you've got an awful lot of bags you won't have much to store anyway. As others have said, earlies don't store well and don't generally give much of a yield compared to later varieties. I'm not far from you and use bags and containers mainly for first earlies which give me a yield of about 1.5lb per seed potato. If you leave them they will bulk up but the point of earlies is to get that new potato taste. They won't come to any harm if you just leave them but keep an eye out for blight. I see there are suspected cases in north Lancashire which aint far away