Preparedness for when

nuatha

annie123 wrote: »

The 2nd thing:
Vacuum sealers..........lidls have one for £20. Do I need one? are the bags expensive to buy? As I now have a dehydrator would I use a sealer?
Your thoughts and experiences please preppers.

I didn't find a vacuum sealer that I bought from lidls gave that good a vacuum, I ended up replacing it two years on with one at 4 times the price that does actually vacuum pack. Having said that, its a good sealer, it did draw a lot of the air out of the bag (just not all of it) and worked with ordinary bags. Subjectively I think I got less freezer burn on stuff that I packed with it. It was using the lidl's one that convinced me I could justify a decent bench top one.

Bags, lidl do a roll of freezer bags that are marked as suitable for sous vide (posh boil in the bag) they're cheap, work as well as anything else I tried with that vac packer, and good quality.
HTH

craigywv

went out to check on my spuds, i think theymay have blight again!!!!!!!!!!!!! startin to take this personal mama nature!!! you did the same to me last year. they have frecl=kles on some leaves so its prob burn and get rid of the soil AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!! they were growing great should i give them a few more weeks to see if it is blight as its only freckles on 1 of my plants help preppers please xxxx

GreyQueen

craigywv wrote: »

went out to check on my spuds, i think theymay have blight again!!!!!!!!!!!!! startin to take this personal mama nature!!! you did the same to me last year. they have frecl=kles on some leaves so its prob burn and get rid of the soil AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!! they were growing great should i give them a few more weeks to see if it is blight as its only freckles on 1 of my plants help preppers please xxxx

And breathe; it may not be blight at all. If it is, you'll know within days not weeks. Keep an eye and if the tater tops start to yellow and keel over in a hurry, you have it .I've had plants go from perfectly green and perky to listing 30 degrees from the horizontal and mostly yellow in under 24 hours). If all that happens but very slowly, it's natural maturation of the plant, not blight.

If so, get tops off and away. Experts say burn them. We have a burn-ban on our lotties April-Oct but even if we didn't, how the heck to you get a lot of sappy tater tops to burn?!

craigywv

GreyQueen wrote: »

And breathe; it may not be blight at all. If it is, you'll know within days not weeks. Keep an eye and if the tater tops start to yellow and keel over in a hurry, you have it .I've had plants go from perfectly green and perky to listing 30 degrees from the horizontal and mostly yellow in under 24 hours). If all that happens but very slowly, it's natural maturation of the plant, not blight.

If so, get tops off and away. Experts say burn them. We have a burn-ban on our lotties April-Oct but even if we didn't, how the heck to you get a lot of sappy tater tops to burn?!

thanks GQ whats natural maturation and should i be worried ......ie neck them!!!

GreyQueen

Shouldn't post when tired...........:rotfl:

Potatoes are an annual crop. They grow for a certain number of weeks then the tops start to die back. They'll gradually turn yellow, starting with the lowest leaves, the ones just above the ground. This will spread over the plant, taking 2+ weeks. It's not an exact science because it depends on the variety of potato and the weather (degree of warmth, how much rain etc) and that will vary year on year, even with the same variety on the same ground. If it's very dry, they go over faster.

According to my gardening book, its approx 13 weeks form planting to lifting for early spuds and 22 weeks for main crop. It doesn't say about 2nd earlies, but I guess that'd be somewhere between the two.

I planted chitted 2nd early and maincrop on Good Friday which will mean they've been in 12 weeks this coming Friday. Basically, if the tops are still green, the plant is still photosynthesising, which means it's still adding bulk to those lovely little spuds underground. There's a school of thought about letting the tops die away completely, until they're dry brown stalks, so the plant draws all its goodness back down into the tubers and you get bigger spuds.

Howsomever, there is a risk of blight, which enters the plant via spores on the tater tops (they wash off into the soil) so if you have it, best to cut off the tops and get them off site and burned if at all possible.

I have one or two yellow leaves on some of my 2nd earlies. I'munbothered; they are the lowest and oldest leaves on the plant, they have gone uniformly yellow with no brown speckles, and I would expect that to be just natural aging. If I had random yellow leaves dotted around the plant, esp on the highest and newest leaves, I would be concerned.

Anyway, good luck!

craigywv

thanks GQ for that very imformative post, i know your tired but 1 last question please, can i eat whatever spuds are there if it IS blight? thanks again xxx

GreyQueen

craigywv wrote: »

thanks GQ for that very imformative post, i know your tired but 1 last question please, can i eat whatever spuds are there if it IS blight? thanks again xxx

The short answer is....there isn't a short answer.

Blight isn't poisonous and won't harm you, but if it gets into the tubers (taters) it creates spots which are then colonised by secondary rots which destroy the potato, causing it to rot in storage.

Back in 2007, I shared a lottie plot with a friend-of-a-friend elsewhere on the same large site as my current plot as I was 18 months on the list waiting for my own.

Sooo, one evening, I was up there about 8 pm, admiring my tatties just before I left. Several rows of sprightly green loveliness, not a yellow leaf or a blemish on them. Next afternoon, I was up there about 4 pm. Spuds were almost completely yellow, and listing sideways so badly that they were hardly avoiding lying on the ground.

I stood there utterly appalled at the devastation. I was convinced that someone had sprayed them with herbicide, it looked like plant murder. One of the old boys came up and told me what to do.

I severed each tater top as close to ground level as possible and got them bagged up inc any stray leaves and off site. That took some time. The next day, I started digging them up. I had the use of an empty greenhouse so, at the Old Boy's suggestion, I lined the slatted wooden staging with several sheets of newspaper, and then brushed as much earth off each tater (I used an old 2 inch housepainting brush) and laid it on the staging. I did this until the staging was full, then I covered them with several more sheets of newspaper against the light and left them a day or so, with the greenhouse door and vents open.

The purpose of this was to get them as dry as possible before sacking them up. I then looked at each potato closely before putting it into a paper tater sack. On a white-skinned variety, what you're looking for is a sort of bronze shadow on the potato's skin. These ones I put aside for immediate consumption.

For the first 2-3 weeks, I shot the bagged potatoes out onto the shed floor about twice a week, removing suspicious-looking spuds as I spotted them. Then I went to once a week, one a fortnight, the numbers of suspicious ones falling with each go-round, until by Dec there were no more bad 'uns.

What Dad taught me, and what I have found to be true, is that the areas which have been touched by blight often have a sort of sweaty appearance, as the next stage on from the slight bronzing. That area then seems to sink a couple of mm inwards, and that is the start of the rot process. It tends to look greyish once its been going for a while. You can cut that area out (with a generous margin) and discard and the rest of the potato will dry out on the cut edge and be perfectly fine.

Blighty potato bits shouldn't be composted, and it's best not to compost tater peelings if possible, as you can be building a resevoir of disease into your soil. If you keep hens, you can boil the peelings for them, it's what my grandma always used to do in winter.

If you think you've had your crop affected by blight, keep a close eye on the tater sacks and shoot them out from time to time to check nothing untoward is happening. It's sound domestic practice to check on stored veggies and fruits anyway, as one rotten tater or apple will spread to the rest. If you don't have tater sacks, cardboard boxes lined with several layers of newspaper and covered with more paper will be fine, as long as they are in a frost-free place. Spuds need to breathe and be kept out of daylight, as it causes they to go green, which is the formation of poisonous alkaloids in the spud. So cut green bits off, it isn't an old wives tale that they're bad for you.

The potato blight I had last year wasn't nearly so dramatic as the one back in 2007; it manifested as a lot of brown speckles on the leaves. I wasn't sure it was the blight so kept an eye of a few consecutive days as the taters had not started to go over naturally and could still have made a lot more growth. When the speckles were spreading from row to row, I made a judgement call and had the tops away. It was the blight, but I lost less than 5 % of the crop by weight to a small number of hopelessly-rotted tubers or blighted bits trimmed off other potatoes.

Blight can move scary-fast so if you think you have it, better to act sooner rather than later. Vigilence should be a gardener's middle name............HTH.

craigywv

GreyQueen wrote: »

The short answer is....there isn't a short answer.

Blight isn't poisonous and won't harm you, but if it gets into the tubers (taters) it creates spots which are then colonised by secondary rots which destroy the potato, causing it to rot in storage.

Back in 2007, I shared a lottie plot with a friend-of-a-friend elsewhere on the same large site as my current plot as I was 18 months on the list waiting for my own.

Sooo, one evening, I was up there about 8 pm, admiring my tatties just before I left. Several rows of sprightly green loveliness, not a yellow leaf or a blemish on them. Next afternoon, I was up there about 4 pm. Spuds were almost completely yellow, and listing sideways so badly that they were hardly avoiding lying on the ground.

I stood there utterly appalled at the devastation. I was convinced that someone had sprayed them with herbicide, it looked like plant murder. One of the old boys came up and told me what to do.

I severed each tater top as close to ground level as possible and got them bagged up inc any stray leaves and off site. That took some time. The next day, I started digging them up. I had the use of an empty greenhouse so, at the Old Boy's suggestion, I lined the slatted wooden staging with several sheets of newspaper, and then brushed as much earth off each tater (I used an old 2 inch housepainting brush) and laid it on the staging. I did this until the staging was full, then I covered them with several more sheets of newspaper against the light and left them a day or so, with the greenhouse door and vents open.

The purpose of this was to get them as dry as possible before sacking them up. I then looked at each potato closely before putting it into a paper tater sack. On a white-skinned variety, what you're looking for is a sort of bronze shadow on the potato's skin. These ones I put aside for immediate consumption.

For the first 2-3 weeks, I shot the bagged potatoes out onto the shed floor about twice a week, removing suspicious-looking spuds as I spotted them. Then I went to once a week, one a fortnight, the numbers of suspicious ones falling with each go-round, until by Dec there were no more bad 'uns.

What Dad taught me, and what I have found to be true, is that the areas which have been touched by blight often have a sort of sweaty appearance, as the next stage on from the slight bronzing. That area then seems to sink a couple of mm inwards, and that is the start of the rot process. It tends to look greyish once its been going for a while. You can cut that area out (with a generous margin) and discard and the rest of the potato will dry out on the cut edge and be perfectly fine.

Blighty potato bits shouldn't be composted, and it's best not to compost tater peelings if possible, as you can be building a resevoir of disease into your soil. If you keep hens, you can boil the peelings for them, it's what my grandma always used to do in winter.

If you think you've had your crop affected by blight, keep a close eye on the tater sacks and shoot them out from time to time to check nothing untoward is happening. It's sound domestic practice to check on stored veggies and fruits anyway, as one rotten tater or apple will spread to the rest. If you don't have tater sacks, cardboard boxes lined with several layers of newspaper and covered with more paper will be fine, as long as they are in a frost-free place. Spuds need to breathe and be kept out of daylight, as it causes they to go green, which is the formation of poisonous alkaloids in the spud. So cut green bits off, it isn't an old wives tale that they're bad for you.

The potato blight I had last year wasn't nearly so dramatic as the one back in 2007; it manifested as a lot of brown speckles on the leaves. I wasn't sure it was the blight so kept an eye of a few consecutive days as the taters had not started to go over naturally and could still have made a lot more growth. When the speckles were spreading from row to row, I made a judgement call and had the tops away. It was the blight, but I lost less than 5 % of the crop by weight to a small number of hopelessly-rotted tubers or blighted bits trimmed off other potatoes.

Blight can move scary-fast so if you think you have it, better to act sooner rather than later. Vigilence should be a gardener's middle name............HTH.

thanks ever so much for your time and effortin repling to my questions. Ishallkeep a close eye on them i hope they salvagable xxx

the_cake

Brilliantly informative post - very many thanks, GQ. Haven't suffered from blight for a few years, but never knew that much about it. Better informed now, and gratefully so....

GreyQueen

the_cake wrote: »

Brilliantly informative post - very many thanks, GQ. Haven't suffered from blight for a few years, but never knew that much about it. Better informed now, and gratefully so....

It's my pleasure; I get a lot of help from fellow MSE forumites and it's nice to give back.

Many times in this life, I've acquired a snippet of info thru something read or seen, a conversation, something overheard which, although random at the time, has proved very useful. Sometimes even many years down the line.

I fear that there will be a time, even in my lifetime, when the leccy will be off, the internet down, and we will be in a post-SHTF situation without many of the skills which would have been commonplace in society 100 years ago. And we will suffer for that ignorance, and some people will die unnecessarily.

Those of us who do quaint things such as growing our own veggies, rearing our own lifestock, making things can form a knowledge reservoir to help in troubled times.

I have Dimitry Orlov's book Reinventing Collapse on order from the library. It's about what happened in the former USSR after economic collapse and is seen by many in the Peak Oil/ Long Emergency crowd as a must-read and a template about what may happen in western developed countries when it all goes horribly wrong in an ecomomy. I'm looking forward to expanding my awareness but not expecting it to be entertainment.

I was reading about Detroit, once one of the world's richest cities, now on the cusp of bankruptcy with runaway crime and a large chunk of it's population fled. It called to mind a town I know well which had one industry which caused it to grow from a tiny village into a good-size town between the Middle Ages and the early twentieth century. It was an extractive industry and thus went the way of all extractive industries - bust when the resource was depleted beyond viable exploitation.

This town had a second hurrah with another industry which had been and gone by the 1970s, leaving a hollowed-out and shabby shell. People who have the misfortune to be born in Town (I have lived there myself as an adult) and who have any gumption, just leave when they come of age. The bulk of the people who are left in town are the people who lack gumption and are content to eke an existance on the social, and the professionals whose work supports and attempts to control them (police, social workers, school teachers, youth workers etc etc). Some of those school teachers are friends of mine.

They work very hard to develop the children of families which are going into the third generation of unemployment. But still, this place is one of the worst in the country for educational failure and very young parenthood, with the attendant problems.

What would be the sensible reaction of people in Town? The answer would be to leave. There are no walls to stop you, the roads are perfectly passable. Within a few miles you can be in much better territory. If we had no social welfare provision, people would have to leave or sit on the street and starve.

I expect to see a sharp contraction in social security in the coming years. Expect, not welcome, I hasten to add. What will this mean for people living in areas which expanded to meet a need for workers in a particular industry which had since departed? I think it inevitable that we will be seeing, as a country, a lot more internal migration as people move from region to region.

What will that mean for us as preppers? I think it's prudent to say to ourselves; am I of working age? Am I raising children who will be working in a few years? Are we living somewhere they can reasonably expect to get a living? Am I helping them to get the skills they need for what my area has to offer, or is their education at home and at school condemning them to either unemployment or out-migration? If your town/ city/ region is starting to go down the tubes, it will be smart to move on sooner rather than later, as it will get more expensive and difficult later on.

Tough thoughts. I know people with good degrees in things like Film Studies and Philosophy. The do part time shop work and struggled to get even that, and have had nothing more lucrative for years. Poor return on their investment in their education.