Monday, May 8, 2017

Potato blight?

A few days ago, I noticed what looked to me like early blight on one of my potato plants.  I removed the leaves and sprayed the plant with some organic neem oil spray.  If I have a crop failure, it won't affect my livelihood, nor will I go hungry, but I did pause to think about commercial growers or people who are feeding their families on what they can grow themselves.  Yesterday, I saw one other leaf on that plant that was affected.  I removed it this morning.

One article I read about early blight said, "Despite the name "early," foliar symptoms usually occur on older leaves."  I got a chuckle out of that.  That sounds like something a plant pathologist would say.  A farmer or gardener, on the other hand, might call it early blight if it generally appeared early in the growing season.
I did notice on another plant (in the second potato bed), some black curled edges on a new leaf.  I'm not sure what that was, but I removed the leaf and sprayed with neem oil.
 
Overall the potato plants look pretty good, I think.  I mounded the soil around each plant, added more compost (and a little 10-10-10 since I'm only "mostly organic"), and then added some mulch in the form of some of last year's stilt grass that was growing in an untended area.



 
The problem I have coming up, though, is that I have no suitable place to store the potatoes.  My folks always store theirs in the cinderblock building that houses the well.  It's in a shady area with a concrete floor, so it's not too hot in the summer and doesn't freeze in the winter, and it's dark.
One might think a crawl space would be good, but ours is susceptible to flooding.

3 comments:

  1. I have never grown a potato but have seen a few, those hills look good to me.
    Driving thru Idaho I kept thinking their barns were under ground. The tractors would go down into a barn that you could see only the roof. I thought it was because of tornadoes at first, then realized that is where they stored the potatoes. (I'm a little slow!)

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  2. PS: They were harvesting with potato diggers. Now that is one dirty job, the dirt and dust around the unit was THICK!

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  3. We plany out potatoes in containers. Since there are only two of us, we do three containers and they provide plenty of taters for us.
    We love them.

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