Whilst you all guess at jim's favourite potato, could I ask what might be a daft question please? As I have never really had a successful crop of any sort of potato ( 3 yrs, blight, blight, blackleg) and I don't have an allotment, just a patch in the field next door, I don't really know what good looks like. If you pick earlies at the early stage ( the size you get in the supermarkets, say 3 or 4 cm long) what would be a good weight of crop per plant please?
My post blackleg charlottes produced about 500g per plant. Was that a reasonable crop?
And I guess you aRe right about the international kidney!
Well Jacky if you are having that bad luck with blight and blackleg then you could try doing what I do and that is to grow your spuds under black polythene.
As I understand it blight is not carried by rain but rain causes the blight spores already in your soil to bounce up and splash the leaves and if the humidity is right it infects the plant. If you can stop that happening then you reduce the likelihood of getting the disease. I used to get blight and spraing as my two worse potato enemies but since I've grown them under black polythene I've reduced the problem if not eradicated it completely. Last year when it was really wet and loads of potatoes were lost to disease I managed to harvest about three quarters of my crop and they saved well with regular inspection and making sure any soft ones were not infecting the others.
The worst disease you can have is spraing because you can't see it at the time of harvest as the potato looks normal and you store it only to discover later when you peel it or cut it up that it has those brown marbled marks running right through it and it's useless. At least with blight you can usually see that the spud is not quite right before you go to the trouble of storing it.
So why not give it a go?
I couldn't go back to the old ridge and furrow method now as it's so much easier with polythene and you don't have to weed either. The only thing you do have to do is make sure you have some irrigation pipes running underneath the polythene for really dry spells but some years I've not bothered using them and watered the foliage instead and the spuds bulk up just as well.
Some tips.
Spead some well rotted manure on the surface before you lay the polythene. You don't have to dig the manure in.
Make sure you weigh down the polythene well so that it doesn't blow away. I use house bricks....not just round the edges but in-between the plants as well. If you stand the bricks on their edges then you have some 9inch supports to lay cardboard over them to protect them from frost. Getting the plants off to a good start is important in my view as it affects the final weight of crop.
When you cut the slots in the polythene for the plants to grow through increase the distance between the plants by 6 inches because when you grow them this way they tend to spread out on the surface. A potato produces most of its tubers just below where the haulm meets the soil and because you don't bury the initial seed potatoe but just press it in so that it is only just covered with soil it will spread sideways. That's the beauty of it because when you lift the polythene there's hardly any digging involved and all the little darlings are sitting there on the surface ready for you to gather like windfall apples.
To your question I would say that was a reasonable weight of spud given that it was a diseased spud in the first place but I wouldn't try storing them over winter. I'm never bothered by weight of crop (within reason) as the point of growing your own is to get a decent tasting end product. If you want loads of bland potatoes there's a supermarket down the road. That's why Lisa's post was in keeping with the point of the forum and of was of some value.
It's raining out there, that's why this is such a lengthy reply
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