[vineweevil1]

A fellow plot holder (of 20 years) was telling me yesterday that some of his tatties get flowers that fall off and he hardly notices they have flowered but their are spuds there and he said you don't have to wait for the dying back of foliage, so;

a) I have premiere in flower at lottie, is there likely to be anything underneath?
b) Been for a furtle in my potato bags at home and found nothing, but felt if I went any further down I was going to damage the plants.  Will the puds be right at the bottom?

I am guilty of not watering the potato bags at home properly, will the spuds just not have formed or will they just be small or behind??

[aelf]

Mine are all in various stages of flowering (earlies, salad and main) and I've had a furtle too. There are lots of little beauties that could do with a little longer but I'm getting impatient!!

I find that if the plant has flowered fully (and about to drop them) that is the optimum time to harvest but the spuds will sit happily in the ground (and continue growing in size) for a while yet. I do like to harvest them all once the foliage starts to wither and yellow, to reduce the losses to slugs and blight etc but have been known to leave entire rows of spuds in the ground right up to November and they have still been ok!

If your plants are flowering, then there will be spuds there - their size and quantity will depend entirely on how well watered and fed they have been. Hope that helps!

[Trillium]

We never touch our potato plants until we see the flower buds starting. We can carefully lift a few of the larger ones from a plant, but not too many, then cover them back up. Mostly, we leave them until dieback so that we get the largest ones we can.