Potatoes - the hidden story

[antipodes]

On Saturday I was clearing some space for the French beans and I pulled out a volunteer spud. I thoughts this was a good example of how the spud grows. You can see the spud that it's growing from (that will eventually rot away) and the stem with the tubers starting to grow on the offshoots. This poor spud valiantly gave its life for educational purposes!  ;D ;D

Sorry for the poor photo quality, all I had was my mobile.

[antipodes]

[amphibian]

I have loads of volunteers this year. I grew Salad blue, the blue spuds are hard to spot when harvesting, some of the spuds are baker size and I missed them.

[Ian Pearson]

Watch out!! Overwintered spuds can carry blight from the previous year.

[Karen Atkinson]

great to see this - will show it to my kids as well! Thanks.

[antipodes]

Watch out!! Overwintered spuds can carry blight from the previous year.

Yes yes yes that's what everyone says but I admit that I have never seen it myself. We seem to get much less blight here than in the UK, I guess conditions are drier.
I sometimes get better spuds from volunteers than from the real plantings!!

But the pic was mainly to show the spud growth underground  ;)

[Robert_Brenchley]

A lot of my potatoes have been coming out with little white spots; a fir few are half rotten. I can only think that's the early stages of blight, since we had a massive outbreak last year. I did cut the tops off promptly, but it was so bad I've been wondering whether it was in the tubers.

[star]

I dug lots of volunteers up too. They are firm enough with white shoots, but they smell not of rotton potato......just smelly. So I wondered about blight as well.