"Dig around for the best tasting potatoes"
Bunny Guinness, Garden Writer and Broadcaster, speaks from experience in the Sunday Telegraph. She has eaten the spuds she talks about and gets opinions from other people who know and care about the taste of the potatoes they grow. Bunny's recent taste tests included several Sarpo varieties and I am delighted to say that both she and her correspondents were very pleased with their flavour. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/howtogrow/
Potato Day for Crowdfunders 1st March.
You will all have heard the great news about us hitting our target of £10000 just before Christmas with all your help. It was touch and go and a bit nail-biting for us but thanks to some backers who tweeted their socks off and some very generous donations, we made it. Now we get down to the hard work of assessing Crow – with your help.
As you know, we are having a Potato Day to get us started and invite you to Henfaes on St David’s Day, Friday 1st of March. We are less than one hour west of Chester by the A55. See map on main website to get you there. We will start at 10a.m. with coffee/tea, then have some talks and discussions about assessments that backers can do at home. We will have a simple lunch – like Sarpo soup and other potato goodies. In the afternoon, if the weather is kind, we can view bits of the farm down to the beach.
To our Movers, Players, Shakers, and Go Getters to whom we have promised samples for growing and tasting:
It would help us a lot if you tell us if you want the samples of seed for growing at home that we advertised on the buzzbnk website or not. Obviously, it saves us a lot on postage if you can pick them up at the Potato Day. If this is impossible and you don’t have a local friend who could collect them, then let us know and we will try to send them. You will understand that stocks of Crow, being a new seedling, are in very short supply so we need to make sure that we do not eat too much of our “seed corn” at this stage and that we retain enough to plant for the future. Because we have so many Players, Shakers and Go-Getters we can supply seed of Crow to them for planting experiments but not larger potatoes for direct taste testing.
Please let us know how many of you will attend.
Many thanks for helping us with this exciting and unorthodox experiment. We look forward to meeting you and hearing of your ideas for growing and assessing Crow.
David and Simon
David Shaw 07906 710704
Simon White
Sarvari Research Trust
Henfaes Research Centre
Abergwyngregyn
Llanfairfechan LL33 0LB
We have a “Crowd” of 140 supporters and researchers who help us with our work.
(see www.buzzbnk.org/sarvari and http://www.hartley-botanic.co.uk/gardening-tips/john-walker/crowd-cultivation/)
Listen to interview on Radio Dublin podcast http://www.sodshow.com/2012/11/29/the-sodshow-meets-david-shaw-of-sarvari-trust/
Twitter @SarpoUK
Telling Ireland about blight resistance
Good ol' Peter Donegan of the Sodshow, Radio Dublin, asked me about our Sarpo spuds that had done so well in Ireland this year. I was over there to celebrate the Sarpo harvest in the Fumbally Cafe with Kaethe Burt-O'Dea and the lovely SPUDS.ie crowd. The full interview (in two parts with music in between) is on this podcast http://www.sodshow.com/2012/11/29/the-sodshow-meets-david-shaw-of-sarvari-trust/
Kitchen Garden - Potato Blight
The December issue of Kitchen Garden has a lot to say about blight and offers a rebuttal of the "gardeners to blame for blight". Lots of good advice on control and use of varieties with blight resistance. Thanks KG
Bingo! We done it
We are delighted to announce that our crowd has got us to our target with time to spare. We now have a great crowd of supporters that is still growing. You may have noticed we have a second milestone to get the project to £10000. Our first target of 5k gets us part way to progressing our new variety but the 10k total should get us all the way. Many, many thanks to our 55 backers for their support and generosity. We hope you will enjoy participating in the project.
Allotment amateurs blamed for blighting UK potato crop?
Have you seen the furore sparked off by a bit in The Grocer about interviews with The Potato Council?
http://www.thegrocer.co.uk/fmcg/fresh/fruit-and-veg/allotment-amateurs-are-making-potato-blight-worse/233373.article#comments_form
Telling gardeners to buy well-produced potatoes from their retailer rather than growing their own is not a good idea - it will fall on deaf ears. Why do gardeners bother to grow their own? Exactly because they do not want to buy "well produced potatoes" sprayed every week with chemical fungicide.
There are several issues involved here and in some of the press articles propagated by that article. This is how I see it:
Blight has been rampant in gardens and allotments this year - this bit is certainly true.
Amateur growers have less effective control available - meaning chemical sprays - true - heavy metal poison copper is the only approved blight spray and who wants to use that? The farmer has many, (mostly less toxic) sprays he/she can buy. Thus most amateurs do not spray and, in a year like this, their crop gets totally blighted and spores drift off to infect healthy potatoes in the vicinity. Should this be a concern for farmers? Hmmmm! If their crops are regularly doused in chemical does it matter that much? The problem is that continuous wet weather prevents the spray tackle getting on the field every 4 or 5 days to keep that protection intact. So chemical control is less than 100% and spores from gardens could do some damage.
Blighted foliage should not be put on the compost heap - Hmmmmm! It would be better to put it on the heap AND cover it up rather than leave blighted foliage lying around to keep generating spores. There is no convincing evidence that the blight pathogen survives more than a few weeks in a compost heap or in the soil as the spores need to infect potato tissue if they are to survive. (where both mating types of the pathogen are present in a crop there is a very low probability that resistant oospores form and contaminate the compost and infect a new crop the following year). Hygiene is important so cutting off foliage and composting it reduces transmission to other crops.
'Gardeners do not know how blight should be controlled' (and don't care). Fact sheets and websites on blight and its control are readily available already and mean that the amateur is now much better informed about control. There is certainly more scope for spreading good practice more widely e.g. all waste and undersized tubers should be destroyed - in a tank of water or buried DEEPLY. Tubers should NOT be kept for seed as some may be blighted and these can produce blighted plants in the new crop. Buying in certified seed every year is always worth while.
But the elephant in the room is that the industry and amateurs are growing varieties that are susceptible or highly susceptible to blight. If all varieties grown were resistant or even moderately resistant, control would be much easier. An increasing number of amateurs already grow resistant potatoes like our Sarpo varieties and their popularity is increasing. They have been the only crops able to survive in many gardens this year. Of course amateurs also grow very susceptible "heritage" varieties. Professionals do not grow resistant varieties - why would they do that as you can make a variety resistant if you keep it sprayed and even some of the newest varieties grown for the supermarkets are VERY susceptible. Since amateurs rarely spray against blight, growing resistant varieties would certainly cut down the transmission of spores from allotments into farmer's fields.
Potato Industy - put your house in order: start growing resistant varieties, stop polluting our planet and stop blaming gardeners!
http://www.thegrocer.co.uk/fmcg/fresh/fruit-and-veg/allotment-amateurs-are-making-potato-blight-worse/233373.article#comments_form
Telling gardeners to buy well-produced potatoes from their retailer rather than growing their own is not a good idea - it will fall on deaf ears. Why do gardeners bother to grow their own? Exactly because they do not want to buy "well produced potatoes" sprayed every week with chemical fungicide.
There are several issues involved here and in some of the press articles propagated by that article. This is how I see it:
Blight has been rampant in gardens and allotments this year - this bit is certainly true.
Amateur growers have less effective control available - meaning chemical sprays - true - heavy metal poison copper is the only approved blight spray and who wants to use that? The farmer has many, (mostly less toxic) sprays he/she can buy. Thus most amateurs do not spray and, in a year like this, their crop gets totally blighted and spores drift off to infect healthy potatoes in the vicinity. Should this be a concern for farmers? Hmmmm! If their crops are regularly doused in chemical does it matter that much? The problem is that continuous wet weather prevents the spray tackle getting on the field every 4 or 5 days to keep that protection intact. So chemical control is less than 100% and spores from gardens could do some damage.
Blighted foliage should not be put on the compost heap - Hmmmmm! It would be better to put it on the heap AND cover it up rather than leave blighted foliage lying around to keep generating spores. There is no convincing evidence that the blight pathogen survives more than a few weeks in a compost heap or in the soil as the spores need to infect potato tissue if they are to survive. (where both mating types of the pathogen are present in a crop there is a very low probability that resistant oospores form and contaminate the compost and infect a new crop the following year). Hygiene is important so cutting off foliage and composting it reduces transmission to other crops.
'Gardeners do not know how blight should be controlled' (and don't care). Fact sheets and websites on blight and its control are readily available already and mean that the amateur is now much better informed about control. There is certainly more scope for spreading good practice more widely e.g. all waste and undersized tubers should be destroyed - in a tank of water or buried DEEPLY. Tubers should NOT be kept for seed as some may be blighted and these can produce blighted plants in the new crop. Buying in certified seed every year is always worth while.
But the elephant in the room is that the industry and amateurs are growing varieties that are susceptible or highly susceptible to blight. If all varieties grown were resistant or even moderately resistant, control would be much easier. An increasing number of amateurs already grow resistant potatoes like our Sarpo varieties and their popularity is increasing. They have been the only crops able to survive in many gardens this year. Of course amateurs also grow very susceptible "heritage" varieties. Professionals do not grow resistant varieties - why would they do that as you can make a variety resistant if you keep it sprayed and even some of the newest varieties grown for the supermarkets are VERY susceptible. Since amateurs rarely spray against blight, growing resistant varieties would certainly cut down the transmission of spores from allotments into farmer's fields.
Potato Industy - put your house in order: start growing resistant varieties, stop polluting our planet and stop blaming gardeners!
 |
| An early infection on a local allotment this year that is destoying a crop soon after it emerged. Soon there will be nothing left. Best to remove and compost the foliage to destroy the spores. |
Have you joined the crowd?
We are delighted that the crowd is growing and we are almost half way to our target of £5000.
Join the crowd now and get regular updates of our progress (or lack of) in the next few months. Do remember that there is just him and me running the show so sometimes, eg when one of us is away, you may have to be patient if you are waiting on a reply to a question.
It is really easy to join up so why not do it now. Our crowd now has several prominent supporters that I know you would love to meet and talk potatoes to. You will get that chance early next year at our Potato Day - date to be arranged.
Just go to our page on the buzzbnk website
Join the crowd now and get regular updates of our progress (or lack of) in the next few months. Do remember that there is just him and me running the show so sometimes, eg when one of us is away, you may have to be patient if you are waiting on a reply to a question.
It is really easy to join up so why not do it now. Our crowd now has several prominent supporters that I know you would love to meet and talk potatoes to. You will get that chance early next year at our Potato Day - date to be arranged.
Just go to our page on the buzzbnk website