Saturday, June 16, 2012

Protecting potatoes

This is a potato plant in bloom:


This is a Colorado Potato Beetle:


This is what the Colorado Potato Beetles do to the potato plants:


Which is why we spray the plants with Spinosad. It's a bacteria that is considered a natural product, and therefore used by organic farmers/gardeners. 

Despite the above photo, our potatoes are doing pretty well right now. Farmer John has sprayed and hilled them twice. Normally we don't water the potatoes, but this year we have. Farmer John read that the most important time to water them is when they are blooming. So, we'll keep them watered for a little while. After that, it's just a waiting game to see how they do. Hopefully there will be lots of Yukon Golds for the farmers market and winter dinners. 

2 comments:

  1. Wow! How many potatoes did you put in? I LOVE those farm potatoes. They have their own flavor. I suppose all root crops do. Do the chickens eat those beetles?

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  2. Susi - we put in about 100 pounds of seed potatoes. The chickens don't eat the beetles, because we don't let them free range in the gardens. We used to, but then too many chickens were disappearing due to a fox.

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