Well my Butte potatoes have been dying back, a few weeks earlier than I had expected. I am not sure if the die back is due to the heat or disease. Only a few of the plants seem to have really been damaged by insects, so I don't think they are the primary culprit.
In the end I have decided to go ahead and dig the potatoes. What I found has been a lot of small potatoes, with only a couple of the baking-sized potatoes that I had hoped for. It got dark before I could finish today, but I dug 15 pounds of potatoes--which seems in-line with what I would have expected for the amount of plants which I dug. This makes me think that the plants may have put on smaller tubers because the soil was pretty heavy around them--it may have just been too hard to push it out of the way to grow a large tuber.
When I finish digging up the row tomorrow or Saturday, I will be able to tally up my harvest to see how we did.
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Maybe next year when you have been able to work more compost into the soil and loosen it up a bit you will get more potatoes. Are they big enough to scrub and boil? One time we had some about marble size - I tossed a lot because they were even hard to wash since dirt really sticks to them.
ReplyDeleteSo I tallied everything up and from 5 pounds of seed potatoes I got about 57.5 pounds of potatoes, which I don't think is bad. I think the hard soil just kept them from getting very large. There were some big ones when I dug the rest of the row, so they may have been in better dirt.
ReplyDeleteWhile there are some tiny ones, most of them are about golf ball sized, which are still very usable. I just didn't get as many bakers as I had hoped for.