Storing potatoes with mild scab……

[Rhys]

Hello all

I know that storing perfect potatoes is pretty simple, but what is the realistic best thing to do if quite a few of your potatoes have mild scab (the ones with bad are just being used up quickly in the kitchen)?

Clearly you don’t want to mix clean with infected, but is putting infected ones in plastic bags inside a Hessian sack realistic? Should they be in a separate hessian sack to the uninfected ones or will the plastic bags be enough separation? That’s an issue as we’d need to buy some more sacks if separation is key.

Right now we have about 20lb for storage of which about 15lb is clean and 5lb has scab. We’re expecting to lift another 50 – 70lb dependent on yield in the next two weeks and of that, 20 – 30lb is expected to be of a strain which has already shown scab this summer.

I guess the other more prosaic question is whether you should store different strains separately anyway or whether that is silly and pedantic??

The summer has brought very good yields in 35 litre pots with some disease and moderate yields but mostly clean potatoes grown the traditional way in raised mounds in the soil.

We’ve not had scab this bad before so we just ate the infected ones and stored the clean ones, but this year the problem is such that we’ll need to store some infected ones somehow or other…….

Cheers for any hard earned experience…….

[devonstew]

I have stored scabbed potatoes with clean ones, but probably at a smaller percentage than you of large (approx 5tn) crops. Couldn’t see any problems with it. So no hard earned experience……I imagine storing in a plastic bag would be a bad idea….i think potatoes need to breathe but I may be wrong

I like to keep the strains seperate, because I find I generally prefer to use them in different ways – some are better for roasting or boiling, and so knowing which variety does what, is good for the kitchen. Plus if the potatoes make it to the spring then some varieties tend to store better than others, so you can see oh this variety is starting to go, lets use it up.

[charles]

As Devonstew says, scab is not infectious, just a skin conditon from dry and / or alakaline soil.

I agree too that varieties are best kept separate, especially seeing how they store for more or less time.

[Rhys]

We’ll store the Picasso, Desiree and Sarpo Mira separately over winter then.

The Desirees grown normally in the ground were harvested today after following a moon-based calendar for planting, earthing up and feeding potassium prior to harvest at a few days shy of 20 weeks (on another root day).

They were entirely free of scab, the odd one had slug damage and, apart from two plants which clearly went downhill early and hence yielded less than 2lb of potatoes per tuber, the other ten were fantastic and the overall yield from 12 tubers in 3 rows of 4 tubers across a 1.5m bed was 35lb. The rows were only spaced 50cm apart too, so you can clearly get very satisfactory yields in the home garden spacing maincrop closer than many of the books tell you to. Two plants yielded 4lb each and several yielded 3.5lb. It was the best harvest of maincrop potatoes I’ve had yet, which says that Charles’ bed preparation practices work even if you do dig trenches too (manure overlaid in November and dug in in early March prior to planting in April). I added extra comfrey leaves and grass along with soil at earthing up time and this clearly didn’t do any harm. The worm population was plentiful and vigorous as I dug up the potatoes – long may it remain that way!

So, with just 2 Sarpo Mira pots left to harvest from the 5m * 1.5m potato experiment, the cumulative yield to date is 110lb and a few ounces, which is very gratifying when trying to become self-sufficient in potatoes using only one 7.5sqm bed.

 

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