Diseases And Pests Of Potatoes

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

← Read the previous part. Preparation and planting of potato tubers

How to grow a good harvest of delicious potatoes. Part 3

Potato field

Potato diseases

Like most vegetable crops, potatoes have many different diseases and pests. The main problems in growing potatoes in North-West Russia are late blight and scab.

If the scab does not affect the taste, and you can put up with it and even quickly get rid of it, observing a number of preventive measures that I wrote about above, then no matter how we fought against late blight with preventive measures and the selection of resistant varieties, if it is already appeared at the neighbors, then its appearance is inevitable on your site. Therefore, when choosing potato varieties for my site, I give preference to varieties not only with good taste, but also necessarily with resistance to late blight.

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I consider the preparations Bisolbifit, Abiga Peak, Ordan to be good prophylactic agents in the prevention of this disease. In addition, an important condition for a rich and healthy harvest is fertile soil, crop rotation, and watering in dry weather.

If June is hot and humid, then late blight will definitely appear on the leaves. The lower leaves will start to be affected first. In order to prevent a quick and massive defeat by this scourge, in the first half of June I carefully examine the lower leaves of plants. If the initial stage of infection has appeared, then immediately remove the lower leaves from the plants, and then spray the plantings with a solution of Extrasol or Abiga Peak.

When spraying plants, it is important to strive for the solution to fall on the lower part of the leaf, where late blight spores appear. Be sure to add grated laundry soap (72%) or liquid soap to the solution so that the solution sticks better to the leaves. I spray in the afternoon in dry weather. A good option if rainy weather is not expected for the next few days. After removing the lower diseased leaves, the ventilation of the plants improves.

I wrote above about the rest of the preventive measures to prevent late blight at different stages of potato growing.

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Potato pests

Among the pests of potatoes in the conditions of the Northwest, there is: golden potato nematode - a microscopic worm that can enter the site primarily with infected planting material or with contaminated land. Therefore, pre-sowing treatment of new potato varieties is required.

The second common pest is the potato aphid, which infects the leaves and flowers of the plant. Holes appear on the leaves, and the peduncles are damaged, and the flowers do not open in the potato. To prevent this from happening, you can spray the plants with an infusion of garlic with wormwood. Their smell will scare away these pests.

The next dangerous pest that sometimes appears in our region is the Colorado potato beetle, which is brought to us with a southerly wind. The Colorado potato beetle hibernates at a depth of 20 cm, therefore, in the first winter, it dies here, because the depth of freezing of the soil in our country reaches one and a half meters. The only effective measure is to collect it and its larvae by hand. In our village, the Colorado potato beetle sometimes appears, but it never appears on my potatoes. Healthy and strong plants are the obstacle. As a rule, pests affect only weak plants. Therefore, I believe that only correct agricultural technology is the key to combating this pest.

Another potato pest is wireworm. It often appears on soils with a lot of wheatgrass. It is on the roots of this weed that the wireworm settles, feeding on them. Therefore, the main prevention against wireworm is the removal of weeds, primarily wheatgrass. You can use other agricultural techniques, for example, liming and phosphorization of soils, but it is undesirable to do this before planting potatoes, as this can affect the quality of tubers.

It is necessary to strictly observe crop rotations: it is advisable to plant annual legumes before potatoes and root crops (of course, if there is a wireworm in the garden). The deployment of baits and traps is also used. The baits are made from pieces of potatoes, carrots or beets, into which you need to stick twigs and bury them to a depth of 10-12 cm. In a day or two, the baits should be examined and destroyed by the pests gathered there (you can then feed them to the chickens). After the destruction of the wireworm, you need to renew the cut again, sprinkle it with water and bury it in other places to the same depth. The cultivation of white mustard as a siderat (green fertilizer) also helps in the fight against this pest.

In addition, wireworms are attracted to the tubers cut before planting, so I never cut the tubers, planting only whole ones. If you cut the tuber into pieces, you still won't get the harvest, because there is a different number of eyes on each such half. If the potatoes lack potassium, then they are also affected by the wireworm, so I consider the annual application of potassium fertilizer (I add potassium magnesium) before the first hilling to be a mandatory event.

Shrews also cause huge damage to the crop, gnawing large holes in the tubers according to the principle: what I don't eat, I bite. Only cats will save from this pest. You can use poisonous baits, but, dear gardeners, using poisoned baits, you destroy not only mice and shrews, but also cats and cats that catch these pests and eat them later. It's not humane! These potato pests are most common in our area.

Harvest

Planting potatoes

We begin to dig the main crop of potatoes after the twenty-fifth of August. One week before harvesting, I must cut off the tops with garden shears, so that hemp remains 20-25 cm long, which will then be convenient to grab when digging potatoes. It is believed that during this time, nutrients from the tops of the potato will be transferred to the tubers.

I am sure that this is a myth: where will they come from if the ground part is cut off, and on the lower part of the stem, as a rule, by the end of August, the spent lower leaves have already turned yellow. I cut off the stems so that the tubers ripen faster in the soil. At this time, they form a firmer rind. I also cut off the tops in order to remove all plant residues of potatoes, especially leaves if they were caught by late blight and fell to the ground.

So I prevent late blight from entering the tubers. I collect all plant waste in a special container, without throwing it on the ground, so that there is no unnecessary contact with it, by hand I collect from the arable land everything that remains of potato plants, as well as small annual weeds, if they suddenly appear. I throw everything into the trailer of the walk-behind tractor, and on the same day we take out the waste far beyond the site.

In no case should they be thrown into the compost heap, so as not to spread phytophthora, even if the plants are healthy. On arable land, only hemp remains sticking out of the ground. During this time, the earth is ventilated and dries up, this is especially true in wet summers.

We start to dig first the early-ripening varieties, then the mid-ripening ones, but not all. Middle-ripening varieties, such as Zenith, Aurora, Lugovskoy and Belarusian late-ripening varieties for our region: Skarb, Zhuravinka, Lileya and Molly, I am in no hurry to dig up and I don’t remove the tops from them at the end of August - they will grow until September 20. Thanks to such a long growing season, these varieties produce an excellent yield of large tubers.

I noticed that they need a longer growing season. Belarusian varieties have been on trial for the third year, I brought them from the Gomel region. Both in the fall and before planting, I carefully processed them against possible diseases and pests. I wrote about the processing methods above. There is a longer warm season, higher temperatures and less precipitation. In the hot summer of 2011, in the first year of planting on my site, they did not give a very significant harvest, because they were getting used to the new climatic conditions.

The past summer was not very favorable for Belarusian varieties: it was cold and humid, so the tubers were slightly less than the norm, but there were a lot of them in the nest, so I will watch them this year as well. If they do not show themselves (in three years it is possible to adapt to the new climate), then I will not plant them again: the game is not worth the candle.

We dig potatoes only in sunny weather. When I dig up each plant, I immediately sort the crop. I select tubers from the productive nests in a separate bucket - this is the planting material for the next season. I choose not small tubers for planting, but medium ones, sometimes I have to put off very large ones, because there are no others in the nest. I believe that small tubers are not ripe and cannot be used as planting material, the harvest will be poor.

By the way, they are, in my opinion, the best in taste. I choose for landing those with many eyes and no visible damage: clean and even. I put each variety separately. I select a little more than is needed for planting next year: in the spring, all eyes may not wake up on some.

I put tubers in the second bucket for food, in the third - accidentally cut and suspicious ones: we will eat them first. We sprinkle the planting tubers on a film in the sun, and sprinkle potatoes intended for eating immediately onto a plastic wrap in the basement. When the tubers for planting are dry, we also transfer them to the basement. I put them separately from the rest. I put slats between the varieties to separate each variety, and on top - a cardboard with the name of the variety.

Potato harvest

Potatoes dry in the basement for four weeks (at least). During this time, the skin of the tubers will become coarse, and if suddenly some of them are affected by late blight, then after three to four weeks it will become noticeable: late blight will appear in the form of streaks and an unpleasant odor will appear. We also take such tubers far beyond the site and bury them.

If the potatoes are not dried, but immediately put into boxes and lowered into the basement, then due to several affected tubers (which cannot be immediately detected), you can lose the crop and planting material.

Four weeks later: in late October - early November, I begin to sort out all the potatoes. I put on rag gloves with pimples, a medical mask on my face so as not to breathe dust, I sit on a box by the lamp and use my hands to clean each potato of dry soil. Thanks to this cleaning of tubers, I check them for diseases. And only healthy and clean tubers I put in boxes. Even if the summer was dry and there was no phytophthora, I still perform this monotonous and lengthy procedure, as a rule, in rainy weather. It takes 3-4 days. But on the other hand, for many years in a row, I have not found a single bad tuber in the spring after storage.

I put the tubers intended for planting in small plastic (small) boxes: each has no more than two layers. On a piece of paper, with a simple pencil, I write the variety of potatoes, the number of tubers and tape this tag to the box with tape. I plan the number of tubers in the fall, knowing how many varieties, rows and how many tubers there will be in one row. But I always leave a small margin.

I sprinkle the planting tubers with Bisolbifit, which protects them from rot and mold, and then with my father we lower the boxes into the basement caisson. Many gardeners advise washing tubers before storing them. I am categorically against this: the protective layer on the tuber is washed off, and such planting material can deteriorate in winter. For the same reason, dahlia tubers should not be washed.

Read the next part. Potato harvest by June →

"How to Grow a Good Harvest of Delicious Potatoes"

• Part 1. Purchase and disinfection of potato planting material
• Part 2. Preparation and planting of potato tubers
• Part 3. Diseases and pests of potatoes
• Part 4. Potato harvest by June
• Part 5. Analysis of potato varieties at the end of the summer