Potato Outlook 2011

Despite getting a late start and being nibble on by grasshoppers, our potato plants seem to be doing very well this year.  We’ve had a few plants start to die, from too much moisture we think, but overall they are doing much better than last year.  By the end of August last year most of the plants were dying and had to be pulled because we didn’t want the spuds to rot in the ground or be eaten by the ants.

Last year we battled ants, grubs, and potato scab and our yield was very low.  So far this year we’ve pulled a total of two plants, both Norlands (red), and if our findings are any indication of the rest of the potato patch, we’re gonna been eating a lot of spuds this year.  Each plant we pulled had a yield probably equal to that of 3 plants last year.  We’ll try to leave the potatoes in the ground as long as we can so they can continue to grow; once they are harvested we’ll store them in burlap bags in the cold room.

partial harvest from 1 plant

Our two biggest issues with the potatoes are scab and grubs and unfortunately it is very difficult to do anything about either one.  Neither seems to be much of an issue the year, or at least as far as we can tell, so far…