With the rain still holding off, we started lifting the potato crop today. As expected, the yield was seriously down thanks to the serious blight we suffered this year - it was so bad that even blight-resistant varieties of potato were affected. But while the yield might be down, the amount of digging and lifting required is still the same!
The timing of the blight could not have been worse as I had to remove the potato haulms four weeks ago, just as the main crop potatoes were coming into flower. That meant that while all the potato plants had very good numbers of tubers, they didn’t have the chance to fill out to their full size.
The potato on the left is about four inches long and we’d normally expect most of the main crop potatoes to be this size, with a few larger ones and a handful of smaller ones. Instead, we have a handful of four-inch potatoes while the majority are the size of the ones to the right. We’ll still have enough potatoes for our needs for the coming year but won’t have as many to spare for the pigs or for home-brew. Depending on variety, the main crop yield is between one-third and two-thirds down on last year.
If not for the blight, I’d have expected to get two well-heaped barrow loads of pink fir apples from two 30m rows. Instead, we barely have one barrow load. And no, that’s not my tractor creeping into shot. That’s one of the local farmers passing by and probably having a good laugh at the way we do things. They usually do!
We’ve kept the Catrionas, a second early, in the ground until now as it’s the easiest way to store them - we’ve been lifting as we needed them - but with the pigs due to move in to the field they had to come out. As a second early, their haulms were cut off just before the blight hit and so their crop was as expected - about 90kg from 45m of rows with about 60kg being lifted today. Many of these will be kept for seed potatoes while the rest will have to be eaten, bartered or sold fairly soon as they don’t keep well.
Pink fir apples are a late main crop potato and ideally we wouldn’t have cut their haulms off until next weekend, then lifted them a week or two later. The result would have been an identical number of potatoes, but ones that were much more substantial. Still, we have quite a few more rows to lift over the next few days and will have more than enough to keep us going.
We lost all of our tomatoes and a good deal of our potatoes to blight this year. The tomatoes were a particular blow as we bottle loads of them for winter use, (we eat a lot of curry and italian).
Shame about the blight, your spuds look good though, I like how you grow different varieties for their differing qualities. We LOVE spuds!
We had a good year with lady balfour and charlotte, on a smaller scale though. 90kg from 3 of 7sqm plots. We did get a few blighted, but mainly the wet weather has increased the size of most of the potatos.