Treating Potato blight

[Paulottie]

New to organic allotments blight has well and truly struck, still not sure if Bordeaux mix is organic, on packet it is clear to keep away from open water as it will kill fish, does anyone know how it works and if it's ok to use. Also can we put the blighted leaves onto our compost or not?

Welcome to the vine.

All advice is to burn haulms. If they disease is already bad Bordeaux mixture won't work. get the spuds out before it washes down into the soil at rots them.

[poozie]

Update on my potato blight. There is not a single potato or tomato left standing today on my or other allotment plots. Even those who thought they had caught it in time and sprayed. It is a famine. Our spuds were planted too late to have produced anything useful. We have cut off haulms and are burning them. Rightly or wrongly outbreak has been blamed on a chap who grew nothing but spuds on his plot last year. He had a fantastic crop but he left the plants in a festering heap, still there now and no-one has seen him around. Could just be weather though. We will sow a green manure I think but not sure if we will bother next year. We are thinking all that bother in cold weather for nothing.

[jondanie]

Poozie,
Sorry to hear of you and your friends loss. Too bad. There's a high probability that that chap with last years leftovers is to blame. In a lot of cases, the initial outbreak outbreak can be traced to old tubers left lying around from the previous year, old ones dumped in the corner or even in the compost heap (even some tubers left behind in the ground) which then grow and infect the surrounding crop.

I've read some previous threads where people had potatoes growing out out of their compost heaps and were happy to let them grow. This is a great way to kick-start blight in your plot. They should be pulled out and binned, rather than leaving them in the hope of harvesting a pound or two of spuds. Expensive spuds if that single plant wipes out your own crop.

Don't give up hope, I've grown spuds both as a gardener and commercially for a good few years and believe me, there is no magic formula to 100% effective blight control.

Try some first or second earlies next year, so you'll have them harvested before the blight season starts. Pick your variety (cultivar) according to it's blight resistance. They can and do vary a lot.

Hope this helps

[poozie]

Thanks guys for all your help and support, I would feel bad but a lot of experienced growers on the allotments were caught out too. Our summer allotment committee bbq will be a few potato salads short this year. The general feeling was that it had come early. I signed up to Blight watch so I will be prepared next year and might put a notice about it in clubhouse. I now have gone from worrying about running out of growing space to wondering how I will fill void. I think green manures are the answer. We had planted first and second earlies but we got them in late (mid April) so they hadn't enough time to mature. Oh well, you live and learn. :-)

[pigletwillie]

I only grow 1st earlies due to slug damage in main crop varieties in the ground but do grow a blight resistant variety called Sarpo Axona in bags. They stay standing when everything else is floored by blight.

[poozie]

What do Sarpo Axona taste like? Are they ok?