What happened with my potatoes?

madonnaswimmer · Sat Jul 07, 2012 12:42 pm

This year I tried planting Russet potatoes in a container. I started in mid-april from a store-bought potato that was growing eyes in my cabinet.

I posted on the forum a couple of weeks ago about how my potato plants were turning yellow and dying. I was concerned about potato blight:
https://www.helpfulgardener.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=46631
It was suggested that since I started early, that they may be at the end of their season, and I should dig up some potatoes soon.

So, the plants continued to die back, and once they were entirely dead, I waited a week, and then dug them up today. Here's what I found:

[img]https://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a360/madonnaswimmer/July7002.jpg[/img]

A bunch of really tiny potatoes, but they appear in good shape. I found 2 potatoes in the soil that were a bit softer, but the rest (what you see in the photo) were ok.

I would think that if it were potato blight, I wouldn't have ANY potatoes at all, right?

Why do you think I have such tiny potatoes? Was my container too small, or did I start too early in the season? Or both?

Thanks!

Dillbert · Sat Jul 07, 2012 2:00 pm

from the pix in your earlier thread,,, the "spots" on the leaves does indeed look like some flavor of disease.

blight, whatever, will shorten the life of the vine, but obviously if the plant has already formed some spuds underground, those are not affected - except that when the top dies off, they don't get any bigger.

which sorta' fits the scenario . . .

note: I have little experience doing potatoes in containers . . . tried it a couple times, got very skimpy / poor yield, so now I only do them in garden proper.

!potatoes! · Sat Jul 07, 2012 3:56 pm

agreed - container potatoes (unless it's quite a big container) rarely get much size.

DoubleDogFarm · Sat Jul 07, 2012 4:00 pm

Did you plant a whole potato and what was the container size?

Eric

madonnaswimmer · Sat Jul 07, 2012 4:31 pm

I planted about 3/4 of a whole potato, cut up into around 5 or so chunks. The pot is NOT very big... maybe 12-14"? My biggest container is currently being used to house sweet potatoes. I didn't want to sacrifice my biggest pot for what I considered to be my "experiment" in growing regular potatoes! Actually, I would have liked to grow red potatoes in it rather than russset, but my reds spoiled on me...

Ideally I would like to plant them into a garden, but don't have access to one, being in a second floor apartment.

Does this mean I should discard the soil that was in that pot?

Can red potatoes get potato blight as well?

gixxerific · Sat Jul 07, 2012 6:14 pm

Get rid of the soil.

Oh and rejoice in such a harvest from a 2nd story balcony. Nice job, sometime my pots do ok other times they are a waste of space.

mtmickey · Sat Jul 07, 2012 8:22 pm

Dillbert wrote:
blight, whatever, will shorten the life of the vine, but obviously if the plant has already formed some spuds underground, those are not affected - except that when the top dies off, they don't get any bigger.

Dillbert, we had late blight a few years ago, and I hate to disagree with you, but every single potato was affected by the blight. It was severely depressing, as we had a wheelbarrow full of mushy, disgusting, blight infected potatoes that had to all be thrown away

Dillbert · Sun Jul 08, 2012 9:38 am

wow - mt you're right - went looking and indeed it will wipe out the tubers!

I've suspected blight a couple times - but either it wasn't or it came too late as the crop was not affected - much less like the ugly pix I found.