Potato questions.

snowgo

This is my first year of growing potatoes. I had good success with second earlies and main crop, so with Christmas dinner in mind, I decided to sew some autumn seed potatoes, putting 3 seed potatoes in each sack & using a mix of half garden soil/half compost. These are Duke of York and Charlotte varieties.

They seemed to do okay at first, but then by the end of Sept/into Oct we had some wet weather and the leaves showed signs of what I thought might be blight. I picked off offending leaves when I saw them. After the leaves all died down I moved the sacks into my garage so they wouldn't be too wet.

I decided today that it might be an idea to see what I've got. I opened up one of the sacks of Duke of York to find that I have a small crop but half of the tubers are rotten. The other half of the tubers look fine - they're firm and healthy looking.

My questions are: Are the fine-looking tubers likely to be okay to eat? I'm assuming the rotten ones are blight afflicted - but perhaps the sound ones have grown from a different plant in the same bag? Or should I just ditch them all?

In view of half of the tubers being rotten, should I dig up all the other bags that I've got in my garage? I had intended to keep them in bags up until christmas, but I'm now wondering if they will all be rotten by then and I might as well deal with them now.

wellused

I grew some maincrop potatoes in the summer and they are now safe and sound in sacks in my garage they will definitely be ok to use at Christmas. Were you trying to grow new potatoes for using at Christmas? Anyhow the potatoes that you have which are not affected by blight should be ok to eat.

snowgo

Thanks for your advice about eating the unaffected ones. Yes, these are late summer sown which I've grown specifically to use at Christmas - as we've nearly finished eating ones stored from maincrop. What made me wonder about eating the fine-looking ones was that on the RHS site it says "Early attacks of blight may not be visible on tubers, but any infected tubers will rot in store." This is what made me wonder about releasing them all from sacks now, although I gather that then they will no longer have that 'new potato' type skin by Christmas.