Grrrr. The bane of my gardening existence. Fucking pesticles. Which kind this time?
Last year, the Apocalypse made seed potatoes impossible for me to get ahold of, so I tried to grow from grocery potatoes. I’ve read that grocery potatoes have treatments to prevent the growth of root nodes, or eyes, so it’s hard to get them to grow in the garden. Plus, I read that you can risk blights and things that way. But it was the Apocalypse, so fuck it, I’m gonna have to make do.
In the end, it was just really poor performance. Only a few of them sprouted, and of those, only a handful flowered, but the flowers kept disappearing. I can’t prove it, but I had very active grasshoppers in the garden last year, and I think they ate the flowers from my potatoes and cucumbers.
Whatever the cause, I got no potatoes in 2020. None. No soft buttery new potatoes, no big ole fall brown love nuggets, none. Boo. But every spring is a new spring so…
This year I replaced my potato sacks because the others had fallen apart after several winters outdoors. I ordered seed potatoes from a seed company, then got lucky and found a few more seed potatoes at Lowe’s. I put in new soil, and Voila! Potatoes a-growin’ like mad. Purple ones and yukon golds, if I remember correctly.
They’ve looked wonderful this year, their beautiful flowers are actually the photo on my home page.
Until now.
Now happening very quickly, is yellowing and speckling of the leaves, from the oldest leaves working up. And the lowest branches have yellowed and browned so much they’re falling off! Sonofabitch!!
First things, first. I got up close and personal, looking on top and under the leaves for little beasties. Bugs are the first pesticle I look for. In previous years, my potatoes have been pest-free except for hungry grasshoppers, so I wasn’t expecting insects and I didn’t find any.
Next I checked the moisture of the soil. I stuck my finger down into the dirt where the stalk meets the soil, and it’s appropriately moist just under the surface. I also checked moisture down lower, by lifting up the little root flap and touching the soil. It was mostly dry. For bagged potatoes, you don’t want the soil way down in the bag retaining much moisture because it can cause root rot and wreck your whole crop. Here in Colorado, the air is so dry, and we get so little rain, that everything dries out pretty well. Having the taters on a drip line helps find the right balance. So watering looks okay.
Bugs and moisture are the easy checks, from here it gets harder to diagnose. Is the problem viral, fungal, bacterial, or nutritional? The first three can be very hard to diagnose because so many of those issues look so similar, and require a lot of research and specialized knowledge. Also, because my garden is small and I grew from official seed potatoes from a reputable seed company (either Burpee, Territorial, or Gurney, I can’t remember), I’m not too worried about blight. So I’m looking at nutritional first.
Earlier this season, after doing the same tests on my zucchini plants – see Something’s Going on with the Zucchini – I discovered that a Magnesium (Mg) deficiency was the problem. Because the potatoes are presenting similarly, I’m going to try Epsom salt. I’ve learned a lot about Mg, specifically that it is a “mobile” nutrient, which means that it moves around within the plants’ vascular system as needed. This presents as the older leaves having a deficiency as the newer leaves use what’s available. New leaves are greener, older leaves yellow and die. That’s what I’ve got, so I went ahead and treated the potatoes with a 3 TBSP per 2 gallons of water mixture, applied to soil at the base of the plant. I went ahead and a hit all the tomatoes, too.
I’m also going to treat the taters with a general veggie fertilizer (yes, you can do both together) because it has occurred to me that I haven’t fertilized the potatoes at all yet this season. I’ll update with results!
The Pottymouth Gardener 
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