Today at the grocery store, I was looking for Yukon Gold potatoes. Specifically those potatoes, because I like them, and I know they haven’t been sprayed with any growth inhibitors, which means they’d sprout and I could plant them. Naturally, HEB no longer seems to carry them. It figures.
Thankfully, when I got home and looked at the gold type potatoes I last bought at the store, most of them were beginning to spout. Researching them, it seems they aren’t a hybrid either, so I guess those are what I will be planting. I’m certainly not paying $15 for potato starts, even though there are dire warnings about planting potatoes you get at the store.
Dire warnings you say? Yes, supposedly store bought potatoes are just rife with soil-borne potato diseases which will then be transferred to my soil and kill all my potatoes and tomatoes from now until forever. Of course, these dire warnings usually come with links to people selling potato starts. I’m pretty much not buying the scare tactics. Sure, there will likely be some risk that there MAY be a plant virus on one of the potatoes I plant, but I’m willing to bet that people who grow potatoes to make money don’t have fields that are rife with potato killing viruses. It would, I would think, seriously cut into one’s bottom line to have fields which killed potato plants as soon as they were planted. So, maybe I’m making a mistake I will pay for and which will cause me aggravation at a later date, but I’m willing to take the risk. Too many people have planted store bought potatoes and had no harm come to them or their plants. Hopefully, it will go that way for me as well.
In other garden news, Sasha had a field day in the newly tilled beds. Much evidence of her tiny little feet digging in them and walking around on them, and this time, there was evidence of a kitty dust bath. The biggest evidence though was Sasha walking up to me obviously covered in my garden dirt. Let her have her fun. She only seems to like it when it’s freshly dug up, as she’s been leaving the other bed alone since I started watering it. Now if I ever catch her digging up a plant, then she and I will have to have a talk! :lol:
Well that is certainly news to me and I’ve been working in association with the British potato industry for nearly two years.
Of course it might be something with how Americans handle their spuds but it sounds more like what you say, sales pitch from people selling seed potatoes.
Did you know you can actually cut potatoes up and as long as an eye and a good area around it is undamaged you can use one potato as several seeds? I’ve not tried it but that’s what they say.
(I should probably add a disclaimer that I’m not any kind of biologist although I’ve had to sit through quite a few seminars…)
The scare-mongering about NOT planting ANY store bought potatoes is quite heavy-handed. A little too heavy-handed. Yes, potato blight is bad, and it will kill your potatoes and tomatoes and be a pain to get rid of owing to the need to sterilize the soil and let it rest for a season, but considering most potatoes over here aren’t organically grown, I’d imagine the fields are so filled with things to kill diseases the risk is going to be slim at best of me personally having a disaster.
I mean, ask Ireland how a little potato blight can wipe out an entire country’s worth of potatoes. If our commercial fields were so rife with the stuff, potatoes wouldn’t be incredibly cheap and available and someone would be complaining about whole crops being wiped out.
I heard about the cutting into pieces thing. Most of the ones I have are pretty small (being the very last ones left in the bag), but I do have one large one, so I might try it just to see what difference there is. The potatoes and peanuts are totally experimental for me. No one in my family has ever tried them either. Or I might end up with so many potatoes I end up giving them away (which would be cool, I bet the local food bank would love to have them).
http://www.potato.org.uk/media_files/FAB_GAs/02seedhealth2005a.pdf
Short version: If you’re particularly concerned about blight, cut up and inspect a few potatoes from the bag, if they’re good then you should be okay to plant the rest. You can make potato salad with the cut up ones afterwards.
There’s a whole section about it over here http://www.potato.org.uk/department/knowledge_transfer/fight_against_blight/advice_blight.html
Actually though, while I’m linking those guys you’re probably more interested in http://www.potatoesforcaterers.co.uk/recipes/ am I right?
Ooooh. Great linkies! Lead me on an exploration of photos of potato diseases. Since I’m not going to have acres of plants and will be staring at each plant personally, likely on a daily basis, pretty sure I would recognize if something is going wrong … at which point, I will have no problems slashing and burning with impunity. LOL!
We’ve been eating off this bag of potatoes for the whole month, and from the same farm for about three months. They’ve all been perfect and entirely blemish-free potatoes. I’m feeling fairly confident it’s not going to lead to any problems. And if it does … well won’t that be educational.
And one can never have too many potato recipes. Oh do we go through the potatoes. Love us some ‘taters! :D
If you know the source and the potatoes all look fine then I’d say they’re as good if not better than seed crop from a source you haven’t personally verified.
The one major advantage of this job (aside from that it looked pretty stable a year ago when things seemed uncertain) is the wonderful food contacts you get :)