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[Primrose]

Welcome ! You're just the person I need to give me some advice on why I got such a miserable potato crop from the various plastic potato sacks I had last year. I used a mixture of commercial compost & well rotted manure and watered regularly, but my crop was pathetic (2-3 lbs per container,) compared with all those "sliced view" newspaper adverts which picture hundreds of potatoes all crammed together.

[Tattieman]

Primrose I would only put 2/3 potatoes per bag. It is a case of less is more. I tried using old manure but I found it compacted around the potatoes and they just rotted. The best results I found were to use just general purpose compost and quite alot of granular fertilizer as the containers allow all the feeding to be washed out of them every time you water them. I also used a foliar feed just to help them along.
I had 85 tubers out of one bag so I was happy with that.

[Primrose]

85 tubers out of one bag. Wow! It must have been your bag which featured in all those newspaper adverts.
My plastic sacks were located in a sunny spot so the compost did get quite hot at times, especially the sides of the containers and I wondered whether that perhaps was a contributing factor in that at times the roots didn't like their growing medium so hot. After all, I'm sure normal soil temperatures underground wouldn't have reached the same levels.

[Shallot Man]

Tattieman. Rather suspect you are going to be kept busy.

[Tattieman]

Here is a picture of the Ulster Classic I grew in one of the green bags.
I think the fertilizer I used helped alot and I tended not to give them too much water but tried to have the compost moist.
The mix I use is 100litres of compost. 16oz of Vitax Q4 and 12oz of calcified seaweed. I use this mix for all my containers.
This year I will change it to 100 litres of compost, 14oz of Vitax Q4 and 6oz of Nutrimate. I will also use a foliar feed such as maxicrop.
For slugs I find nothing can touch the nemaslug product.
The best crops I had were out of the polypots which are black and get really hot during the early months of the year which helps growth early on.

[John P]

I have light soil and having tried a variety of spuds which are to my taste(Floury,being an Irishman),I now use Sharpes Express.and British Queens(Earlies) and Maris Piper (Maincrop) and have been very successful, contrary to advice given to me I have also had good crops of Kerrs Pink

[oldherbaceous]

Morning John P, i was looking through an old gardening book the other night and came across a few varieties that do well in certain soil types.

Kerr's pink were reccomended for heavy and light soils.

[oldherbaceous]

Bet the price of potatoes will be going up with this weather, i don't mean seed potatoes of course.

I will be getting my seed potatoes from you next year Tattieman!

[glallotments]

It's always difficult to recommend potato varieties isn't is - not only do people's tastes vary but the performance of a variety seems to vary considerably too based on all sorts of things which we can't control such as weather, soil conditions etc. WE have had varieties that do well one year and not the next which is why we hedge our bets and grow a few different varieties.

[Elaine]

Hi Tattieman, nice to meet you so to speak!
I'm interested to learn that Desiree doesn't like heavy soil. We grow on heavy soil, though as in OH's case, it has been much improved during the 6 years we have had our allotment. We grow Desiree as a maincrop and have never had anything but excellent results, both in quantity and quality.

The first ever crop we grew, was planted in a plot which was heavily infested with couch grass, despite doing our best to dig all the roots out. I vividly remember our neighbour leaning on the fence, shaking his head and saying ruefully that we were wasting out time, as the spuds "Won't grow in that". He was amazed when he watched us dig up our first lot of brilliant spuds!

Tattieman, this same neighbour removes every single flower off his potatoes, insisting that he is correct in thinking the potatoes "do better"...as in when you dead head ornamentals. My husband pooh poohs this theory....and our crops are much better than our neighbours. However, we do prepare the ground well, with digging and applying plenty of well rotted muck,earthing up etc.
Have you any thoughts on that? Commercial growers don't remove flowers and I don't know of anyone else who does.
Cheers.

[Tattieman]

Oldherbaceous you are right the demand for seed potatoes has gone throught the roof but sales of eating potatoes have fell drastically.

Glallotments you are correct that potatoes that suit one person will not suit another and the area they grow in can determine many factors such as taste and yield.

Elaine we find that heavy clay soil tends to distort Desiree and it prefers a lighter soil. It is good to hear that they do well for you. Removing the flowers from the haulms will allow the potato plant to put all of its energy into the potatoes instead of trying to reproduce. From the sounds of things you must have more feeding in your soil than your neighbour who knows all of the advanced techniques but doesn't seem to know the basics.

May I take this chance to thank all of the Kitchen Garden readers who have taken part in our potato offer. It must have got a few people really excited as they forgot to supply me with their name and address!!!!

[John]

Hello Elaine
Potatoes are such vigorous plants that I doubt whether removing the flowers and so preventing the plant from producing those little green tomato-like fruits will have any effect on the yield of tubers. I can see some sense in this though because those fruits are a real nuisance when comes to lifting the crop and then cleaning the soil. I presume that if they are left in the soil the seeds will germinate next year.
I never bother to remove the flowers though because it is such a tedious and time-consuming job.

John