The sad garden season continues...

[david_anderson]

I pulled the cages from around 4 varieties of potatoes, where the tops have all died back.

Red thumb did fairly well, with little damage.

Purple Majesty were really hard to spot in the soil, and probably half of them had some sorts of nibbles taken out of them. I found slugs on one, so those are a likely culprit.

Nicola was a "free sample"

Comments

[mshrmit]

Pests are the one problem I didn't have. Not sure why, either, since I've never really done more to my slugs than move them out of the garden.

Other than the nibbles, how did your potatoes grow compared to non-burying them?

[david_anderson]

I'll start by saying that weather and injuries kept me from doing a real proper test of the cage method. I wasn't able to keep up with adding compost and straw as deep as I had hoped before they started flowering. These early varieties only got about 12-15 inches over them before I had to stop. The later ones probably got 18-24 inches, so they will hopefully do much better.

The red thumb produced really well, both full sized fingerling, and lots of small potential seed potatoes. If the sierra potatoes had grown to full size, I think it would have been about 20:1 from the seed, but the small tubers kept it down below 10:1. Purple majesty and nicola were about what I would have expected growing them in the ground.

[gracified]

I miss your posts! I hope you update soon. :)