I harvested the third potato variety that I grew this year, and as the title says, I was disappointed.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
There were a lot of big tubers in there and an acceptable amount of small & tiny ones; the size distribution was not an issue. In fact, I could barely put aside 100 pieces of ~50 g seed potatoes for next year since most tubers were significantly bigger. I am still not fully decided if I will plant this variety next year, but since it does reasonably well in the Ruth-Stout method too, I am still considering it. If I decide against it, we can eat those taters too.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
The worse-than-expected problem was pest damage. Not only did I get approx. 9 kg of tubers damaged badly enough that they need to be processed asap; there were several spots with dead stalks above the ground, but no tubers underneath. They were all eaten by mice/voles. Based on how often that happened, I estimate the damage to be 10-15 kg, plus whatever we will have to cut and throw out of this bucket.
There is no late blight on the tubers; they look mostly reasonably nice and healthy. But the overall harvest was less than expected.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
I got circa 65 kg of tubers for storage. This is about the same yield per seed as what I got from Bellarosa and Camel, despite longer vegetation time. And I can confidently blame it all on effing rodents.
BTW, you can see a mouse trap under the weighed bucket. I’ve already caught two mice in my garden shed, and I’ll probably need to set traps more aggressively during the winter. A working cat would help a bit, but then I would need to buy feed for the cat, so the savings would be essentially nil.
I don’t know if it would work in your shed, but we have found a sonic rodent repeller to be very effective. Because they work on sound waves you need clear ‘lines of sight’ so in our case we put the repeller up near the ceiling of our cellar and that was enough to entirely discourage the mice that had been a problem. We now have it in our larder and keep nothing easily edible on the floor, and it seems to have worked there too, despite rodent problems elsewhere in the house we haven’t had any in the larder even though there are tasty targets like bags of nuts and dried fruit in there.
I don’t think it would be an issue for Charly who is male, and his parents who are elderly, but I can assuere you that those things are also very Giliell repellent. I have very sensitive ears and they work on me.
@Giliell, I do not know what frequency the rodent repellers you and Jazzlet have in mind, but I have two solar-powered ones in the garden. The rodents do not seem to mind -- they ate the very apple tree at whose roots one stood the whole winter -- but the buzzing drives me crazy. Which is why I gave up on that idea too, and I am back to setting kill traps and, if it is possible to do so safely for other wildlife, using poison.
@Giliell and Charly, I couldn’t hear the one we’ve got, even back when I could hear the bats that lived in the side passage of the house we first used it in, but I’ve long lost the minimal information it came with, so I’ve no idea what frequency it operates at. And these days I’ve lost the high frequency hearing as well, though my hearing aids do help it’s not enough to hear the bats anymore.