Kitchen Garden Forum

Hello everyone I am new on here.
If anyone needs help with any potato problems then hopefully I can help you. You can read all about what I do in the March issue of Kitchen Garden magazine

Hi Tattieman. Welcome to the forum!
Cheers.

Afternoon Tattieman, and the warmest of welcomes to the forum.
Sounds as if you are just the sort of person we like on the forum.

Just one quick question, i don't suppose you know what happened to all those pretty girls you used to see in the fields at potato picking time years ago, do you.

OH. I think the Yanks took the prettiest ones.

The women all got replaced with machines
People just were not prepared to do physical labour anymore so now 10 men do the work of 150.

Dear Tattieman, thank-you for the infomation.

Ah, they were the days.

And may i just say, i found the write up in the K.G magazine very interesting.

Hi Tattieman, welcome, I will check out your article. I like seaweed and liquid comfrey as a potato fertiliser, what do you use?

We have a special fertilizer programme for each field so that we just use the correct amount of NPK.
In my garden I use a product called Q4 which is a well balanced product for the job.
I am still waiting to see the article. I go to the shop every morning and its not in so I just walk straight back out. The staff are watching me now as they will think I am a shoplifter
I sometimes use maxicrop on the foliage just around tuberisation point to give them a little boost.

Afternoon Tattieman, something i was just wondering, if you have any thoughts on.
I dont know what type of soil you grow your potatoes on, but i was wondering if you think certain varieties of potatoes do better on certain types of land.

As the land round here is fairly heavy, an old gardener once told me that good varieties for heavy ground are, Arran Pilot, Golden Wonder and Kerr's Pink.
Do you think there could be some truth in this?

here is a link, research on the benefits / composition of comfrey compared to other fertilisers

http://www.allotment.org.uk/vegetable/comfrey/comfrey.PDF

oldherbaceous wrote:Afternoon Tattieman, something i was just wondering, if you have any thoughts on.
I dont know what type of soil you grow your potatoes on, but i was wondering if you think certain varieties of potatoes do better on certain types of land.

As the land round here is fairly heavy, an old gardener once told me that good varieties for heavy ground are, Arran Pilot, Golden Wonder and Kerr's Pink.
Do you think there could be some truth in this?

Different soil types suit different potatoes.
International kidney produced in the magical Jersey soil will taste totally different to kidneys planted in my garden and will have different cooking qualities aswell.
Many varieties have now been bred to grow in very light soils or sand in countries abroad and are probably not suited to the UK soil structures.
Nothing really likes growing in heavy wet clay soils.
Do you find that your are struggling to grow maincrops?

Welcome over here, Tattieman. I have read your posts with great interest in "the other place" as Rocketron.

Thanks for your reply Tattieman.

When i first took on my allotment many years ago, i took the old advice of clearing the land by planting potatoes. At this time the land was very heavy, also it was wet Spring when i filled it with potatoes, then it baked all Summer. And yes, when i came to dig the potatoes a was more than a little disappointed.

But over many years the soil has improved considerably and now i have some fantastic crops.

Really what i was probably getting at was, if certain varieties do a lot better in a certain soil, i reckon that would be a massive benefit to the buyer. Now i can't remember seeing this infomation on any bags of seed potatoes, or on any websites selling them.
So maybe a little research into what varieties do better where, and being the first to provide it, might be worth some thought.

It could be known as the, "Old Herbaceous Law".

Rocketron you fairly get about.
Regarding the info about what potatoes suit certain soils. I do have one or two varieties that say they do not suit heavy soil but really it is not a question that I am asked very often. Desiree do not like heavy soil.
I could make up a search on my site for potatoes that suit certain soil types but it would take a bit of time to go through them all.

It was just a thought Tattieman, just wondered if it might be helpful to people that often complain about getting bad results from one variety whilst others seem to get good results. This has come up a few times on this forum before. So if someone had got heavy soil they wouldn't buy one that had got, "does well in light soil", wrote on the bag or on the website.