Potatoes 2018

[billw]

Dec 15, 2017 17:01:57 GMT -5 ferdzy said:

Yes! Rebsie Fairholme mentioned Pink Fir Apple in her book on potato breeding as one she wanted to get seed from but couldn't, and I said, "Wot? Produces seed-balls semi-regularly here" and started saving seeds and growing it out. I'd like to get it crossed with German Butterball if I could ever get them to bloom at the same time, etc, etc.

It rarely flowers here and drops berries before they're mature. I managed to baby a few berries through a couple years ago.

Pollen is easy to save. Just put it in a small container with some silica desiccant for a day and then freeze it. It will last at least six months with good viability, usually longer.

[RpR]

I got my Irish Eyes catalog yesterday. They have about a half dozen new variety exclusives.
Now I do not do the cross breeding you gents an ladies do, actually you have made me feel guilty for burying all the potato fruit I get, but am still curious to try new breeds.
Too many of the new ones, in my opinion, are created just because they look different and are really close to same poo, different piles but I may be suckered into trying a new European type they have listed.
If the garden does well this year, with the little snow cover and very hard freeze we have had, deep frost could screw up first planting, I may, just may, try taking some potato fruit and planting real potato seed next year, but ONLY if this is not a cluster-F year.

[billw]

I ran across a pretty awesome procedural manual for advanced potato techniques (determination of ploidy, pollen viability, pollen germination, embryo culture, etc.). This sure would have saved me a lot of time a few years ago! Potato Reproductive and Cytological Biology Manual

[diane]

Bill, you should add it to the articles thread

[RpR]

Potatoes are doing well this year so far.
I have approx. eighty plants in two gardens . Twice what I wanted but I just could not throw out so many left overs from last year.'
I put new White Giant and finally found some Dakota Pearl plus a few Yukon Gold.
I put in the South Garden the potatoes on the East side where they rarely do real well but there is no reason for that to happen as the only real difference in sides is the West has Coal dust.
I put some in what was a rose garden for many decades and at least the plantz look real, real good there.

[RpR]

Potatoes, at least from the above ground plants are doing very, very well this year but then my entire garden is thriving this year.
I planted some potatoes, in June this year and normally any planted that late normally do not come up and do poorly if they do.
This year the late arrivals look real good.
No potato bugs , so far, so I am very happy about that.
The plots are partly newly purchased but mostly carry overs from last year so except for a few areas it is a crap shoot on what I planted though I tried to separate by appearance when I planted.
Many are still in full bloom and I think some carry overs from previous years that are early potatoes are reaching their final days before die off.
I was surprised that I had two russets from bag bought for cooking and as I have a few spots where original did not come up, I planted them in late June. They had a few eyes popping out but were far from seed potatoes.
Well they popped out of the ground in what I consider and very short time after planting and seem to be very healthy. I am curious to see what their yield will be.

This has been the best year for my entire garden in approx. a decade. The last time I had exceptional gardens like this a year or so later they were horribly bad so I am a bit nervous for next year.

[RpR]

There is a whiskey half barrel outside which had a rogue potato growing in it all summer.
I put up a very large plant that actually looked good with the Sig. other's flowers in there.
Now I thought it was in the dirt in the barrel but it was turning brown and she told me to dig it out, well it was tech. in the barrel but was actually in a ten inch wide pot, which she partially buries in the barrel so it is easier to move to the basement n the fall.
It AMAZING how that potato , the flower was root bound to say the least, carved out a space the size of a soft ball , put up a huge healthy plant and produced a half-dozen potatoes from near golf ball size to shooter marble size in that space.

Not sure how it ever got in there but it was one tough little bugger.

[RpR]

Time to start digging, the taters up North have most died off and sat for hardening.
From earlier digging, the new varieties this year look to have done well and marble size hold over better than expected.
Down South they were put in later and may sit for another week or so as they were turning color but far from properly ready for digging.
As I put over half of them in the part of the garden dad said years ago, they did poorly in , and I had a very bad yield some years back, how they did this year has me anxious to see.
Colorado Potato beetles either did not show up or were chowed on by Lady Bugs, as a few weeks back I noticed some had been chewed on but now stripped like CP beetles usually do and there were no bugs on then at all when I checked.
Insects were scarce this year and I suppose in a good way , that included the bad ones.

As much as I want the all to have done well, with my screwed up taste buds, for me to make French Fries, I used anxiously await digging large potatoes in the fall so I could fry up large plates of fries, is now a bad joke as I can barely taste the first few bits and after that near tasteless.
Some times my gardening now makes me feel like a vegetarian cattle rancher.

[RpR]

I dug up all my potatoes in the past month.
Out of the two gardens I got about two and one half bushel baskets.

My White Giant yield was good , five to eight average size potatoes, but not giant.
Dakota Pearl gave some large potatoes but few had the multi-color skin they are supposed to have.
Yukon Gold, some plants yield was heavy and others average.

I Planted on the East side down South and like Dad would always say, they do not do good there but this year rather than a lot of hand ball to ping-pong size some gave a good average yield while others gave what I call large marbles.
I planted again this year in what was a Rose garden for decades and that patch gave a lot of large/r potatoes.

Not that I need the space as I have more than I really need already but I am thinking of removing the railroad ties that separated the Rose garden with the three by eight patch of grass and just tilling under the whole vegetable garden to near the size it was fifty some years ago .
The only thing holding back on that is it is a lot of work and I would also remove the Black Raspberry plants , that are doing well where the red ones became a bad joke on a good day so I finally ripped out he last ones a few days ago.
The soil, especially down about a foot was very wet.
A few spots I got water drops when I removed excess dirt from the potatoes.