The Potato Saga Continues....

We harvested most of our potatoes this weekend just passed. Not because we wanted to, ideally we would've left them until August time but out of our 12 or so plants not one of them looked even remotely healthy. Originally we were just going to dig up the one plant we had in a container to see what was going on...
This is what the foilage looked like. On first glance it just looks like he's been munched a little (well a lot really...) but all of our plants were displaying similar traits and seeing as this plant was nowhere near the main patch we were a little worried that maybe our seed potatoes had been harbouring some sort of disease so we investigated by pulling this fella and this is what we found.
Euw. What's that? Well we had a look in a few books and we think it's Potato Scab. We're not sure which type though, there's the Common Scab or the Powdery Scab. We think it might be Powdery Scab. Here's a more detailed shot.
Still edible though which is good as it just affect the skins, just need an extra bit of peeling. Bit of a shame as I was looking forward to making some potato wedges but nevermind. Anyway, on pulling this lot we were now thinking that maybe our whole patch was suffering from scab so we decided to pull some plants from the main patch. Now this patch had been decimated, I mean truly decimated, we thought maybe by snails but honestly I can't see how a few snails could possibly cause this much devistation... but maybe they can?
As this was our first year of growing we didn't really plant the potatoes in a way that made them very accessible (lesson learnt for next year). Ideally we wanted to pull the plants at the back but we couldn't get to them! So we had to go for a couple at the front first.

We didn't really hold out much hope as a lot of the stems had actually withered away. But the first couple of plants had a few potatoes, some of a fairly good size. Not quite bakers but a good roasty. And surprisngly no scab, which was good. But the problem we did have that as huge as these plants once were, at their peak nearly 5ft tall they only had maybe four or five potatoes each. Very odd. So we thought that seeing as most of these plants were not going to survive much longer then what the heck, let's pull the majority of them and leave the healthiest ones to hopefully crawl along to August when we can hopefully get some bakers off them.

So there you go. Our first year of potatoes. Not terribly successful. But then again, not a complete disaster.

This time next year.... watch this space.