So please root out volunteers and don't save your own seed when
certified seed is so cheap
To be clear, you are saying that to remove the threat of blight, all
potatoes must be harvested each year and any volunteer potato that is
discovered must be completely rooted out? Since this could be a lot of
work, is there any special tool used by farmers to pull out volunteer
potatoes? Are there any studies that indicate the chances of blight
being caused by volunteer potatoes? For example is there a 50% chance
or 70% chance that volunteer potatoes will cause blight? This may help
motivate us to do the work of uprooting these seemingly harmless
volunteer potatoes.

philcooper wrote:
raycruzer Wrote:
I've heard that volunteer potatoes or those that are not harvested can
cause problems such as blight. This is a problem for farmers, but it
may not be a concern for casual home growers?

Blight is spread in 2 ways, by the spores being blown on the wind and
more often by aphids that feed on infected plants and then fly/are
blown onto other plants and infect them.

The spores and the aphids do not differentiate between the growers of
the crops so if you raise infected spuds by letting volunteers grow or
deliberately plant non-certified seed you could infect other amateurs
and farmers and vice versa.

So please root out volunteers and don't save your own seed when
certified seed is so cheap




--
philcooper