Kitchen Garden Forum

Hi all,
One gardener swears by taking the flower heads from growing potato plants results in bigger spuds,my mates advice is,- "do you think the bloody farmer goes round his crops doing that"? heh! heh!
Can anyone throw some light onto this please ?

Regards,
Mark

Hi Mark,
There is 60 acres of spuds here and I'm not paying anybody to take the blooms off! In truth the spuds aren't mine they belong to a contractor.
I really feel that absolutely nothing would be gained
by taking the flowers off and really there is no sure fire way of proving it.
I suppose his thinking is that because the amount of plant energy used to go up to flower would go into the spuds underground. He may have a point but not a very valid one.
JB.

Yes i thought so too Johnboy,- "thankyou".

Regards.

You could give the local kids a cane each and tell them
"Don't whack the flowers off my potatoes"

Seems to work well with daffodils round here......

Dear David,A plants purpose in life is to set seed and reproduce. So the reason for your freind removing the flowers from his spuds is to delay that process therefore prolonging the growing period. I once read an old book about growing giant veg and one of the chapters was on the record for growing spuds, this guy also removed the flowers from his spuds using a razor blade on a cane so as not to tread and compact the spud patch. Its probably not worth doing it on any earlies but try it on a row of maincrops, but only do it once as you will be hitting the blight period.