{"id":625,"date":"2020-07-01T22:10:33","date_gmt":"2020-07-02T08:10:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ahualoa.net\/farmblog\/?p=625"},"modified":"2021-01-09T11:43:43","modified_gmt":"2021-01-09T21:43:43","slug":"potatoes-summer-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ahualoa.net\/farmblog\/2020\/07\/potatoes-summer-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Potatoes, Summer 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’ve always grown potatoes occasionally, since I was growing up here, but recently I became more interested in\u00a0really<\/strong> knowing potatoes and hopefully increasing production.\u00a0 To this end, I started a spreadsheet to track planting and harvests<\/a>, and ordered some seed potatoes for variety trials.<\/p>\n

Background: We used to just use organic potatoes from the health food store. Some would start to sprout before we got around to eating them, and they got planted in the garden. The yield was never very good, but at least it made a few small potatoes per plant, so it was worthwhile.\u00a0 We had no idea what we were doing, but it was OK.<\/p>\n

In 2019, I ordered sample packs from Wood Prarie Family Farm<\/a>\u00a0(“Certified Organic Maine Certified Seed Potatoes”).\u00a0 It included four varieties – Fingerling, All blue, Caribe, Yukon.\u00a0 The yield was (what I now know is) dismal: under 300 g\/plant, except for one set of All Blue which almost managed 600 g\/plant.<\/p>\n

I continued to plant our rotating set of unknown varieties as well (saved over the years from those store potatoes).\u00a0 These “misc yellow” and “misc red” varieties also produced poorly, the yellows never exceeded 300 g\/plant and the reds were lucky to reach 300-600 g\/plant.<\/p>\n

I eventually did a\u00a0lot of\u00a0reading on potatoes online, and a textbook on potatoes from the library.\u00a0 I learned a\u00a0lot about\u00a0potato history, genetics, and diseases.\u00a0 I learned that by re-planting our own potatoes year after year, we were probably accumulating an increasing number of potato diseases.\u00a0 The only way around that is to order seed potatoes from a very cold place (like Maine) where the winter kills most pathogens.<\/p>\n

From observation, the\u00a0overwhelming\u00a0<\/strong>factor that determines yield, in our gardens,\u00a0is how long the plants live before dying back (from unknown blights or diseases).\u00a0 Nearly everything we plant dies back prematurely, when the potatoes\u00a0are\u00a0still small, and that completely\u00a0explains the low yields.\u00a0 It\u00a0doesn’t appear to be insects, or rot, or anything visible.\u00a0 Just plants dying back too soon.<\/p>\n

So, in 2020 we ordered a more serious amount of Maine potatoes.\u00a0 We are at 2500′ in Ahualoa, 80-200 inches of rain\/year, so we knew we need something that tolerated wet conditions. We chose these cultivars, which Wood Prarie described like this:<\/p>\n