Harvesting some potatoes that have pimples!

My neighbor plucked a few spuds today so I followed suit in order to see if mine were bigger ;-)

Size was not the problem. They had zits! Three of the five tubers had little white bumps on them. They did not seem like a rotting type of feature but were not very pleasing to look at due to some old teenage angst I never really put behind me.

After cruising the web for a bit I found the probable cause. Too much watering that caused their lenticels to swell.  Swollen and protruding lenticels may sound like something you would make a reality show about but it turns out they are just the pores on the skin of the potato. When they stay in too moist of soil they swell up. I found the info in a couple of places. This link has a bunch of other useful potato growing tips.

http://www.ag.ndsu.edu/pubs/plantsci/hortcrop/pp756w.htm

Here's an image of my swollen lenticels.........get your mind out of the gutter. Note that not all the spuds had the same amount of problem. The deeper buried ones were in the soil that stayed wet and had the most zits.

I have the potatoes planted in 3 foot diameter cages with compost heaped up over a foot above the ground level. The compost dried out much faster than the base garden soil so I let myself be fooled into thinking they needed water. I'm digging into the other two cages this week to see how the other varieties fared. It looks like better watering practices are needed by yours truly.

As a side note I keep running into two irritating things regarding plant problems on the web. Number one is poor or no images of the problems people were reporting along with crappy imagery on websites that were trying to show what the issue looked like. Let me know how this image works for you. I'm serious - let me know.

The other thing was all the gardening gods making prophetic announcements that they knew exactly what the root cause of a problem was with little information to go on. Many times the original poster would come back with a "you were wrong" reply after they got some real help. In the case I am presenting regarding the swollen lenticels I saw most of the gardening gods claiming that it was nematodes with all the associated pain in the neck actions needed by the victim gardener. Glad I kept looking.

Firsties!

I've been gardening for quite a long time. There were no string trimmers when I started and DDT was still in use by agricultural groups. It took most of the intervening years to realize that nature had its own agenda regarding how plants thrive. Let's just say when I finally gave up trying to grow bermuda grass in the shade under a live oak it was a turning point in all my dealings with terrestrial flora.

So I hope to be able to provide my experiences to help other gardeners get the most out of their efforts and maybe they can reciprocate by teaching this old dog some new tricks.