[welsh boyo]

after digging up the rest of our spuds they were covered in wet mud, they been allowed to dry on/covered in sheets of news paper,but now have clumps of dried mud stuck to them.
will it be all right to store them like this or does it need to be removed and if so how do i get it of??

[WG.]

leave on the mud.  Washing reduces storage life.

[loubylou29]

Well I don't know what I did wrong, I let mine dry out, stored them in a brown bag and a week later half of them were rotten and mouldy.. i nearly cried!, lost much of the yeild to blight, and then more to.... dunno.... never mind, live and learn eh?

[wildeone]

From what i've read on here you can't store potatoes that have blight! As the spores spread rotting the whole bag!  I really hope you can save some of your harvest ........ cooking and freezing mash etc might be the only way!

Jx

[WG.]

Well I don't know what I did wrong, I let mine dry out, stored them in a brown bag and a week later half of them were rotten and mouldy.. i nearly cried!, lost much of the yeild to blight, and then more to.... dunno.... never mind, live and learn eh?

Yup, blight I'm afraid.

[muntjac]

i hose pipe mine after i get em home into a washing basket . dry em very well on the lawn and then bag em up and they survive me right through tiill spring.i check em out every other week emptying the bag out and checking each spud .i lose maybe half a sack from 10,same with farm cadged ones

[Trillium]

Touch wood we don't get blight here. When we dig out our spuds, we let them air dry on the ground for a few hours then pull off any chunks of mud or soil. Don't want to store the dirt as it will soak up moisture in storage and cause rot. If the spud is only dusty, we leave them. We store in hessian bags, but I have better luck in big slatted wooden boxes raised off the floor an inch or 2 in my storage cellar. Lots of air circulates and slows any possible spoiling. It's also less work to see what is going bad and pull those out asap. Onions are on slatted shelves in a single layer.

[wellingtons]

... and give my spuds a once over with that if they need it.  No water, just the brush.

But I've got sandy aluvial soil so it just falls off anyway.

[Annie]

I don`t normally wash my spuds but I am doing those that had blighted foliage this year just so I can remove any with dark bits and those little tel tail black sunken spots and am also storing these in boxes again to make regular checking easier.All the earlies are hung up in hessian sacks,unwashed.

[GrannieAnnie]

When I dug up my earlies which I thought only the tops had caught a bit of blight, I didn't wash the mud off as I thought once dry it would help protect them.  but a week later when I went to check them in their big pots covered in dry shavings, most of them were rotten.

So today when I dug up the rest of my Desiree as its been 3 weeks since I chopped their blighted tops off, I brushed any dirt off so I could see which ones were okay.  

I was fairly pleased at 35lbs of potatoes from 19 seed spuds, especially as the tops were blighted.  I thought I'd lose a lot more than I have.  Some of them have a bit of blight, but I'll chop the good bits off and use them first.