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Originally Posted by raycruzer
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.
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To reduce the risk of disease for all your crops you do lots of things, the motivation is to keep your (and others') crops disease free. A way to drastically reduce diseases being carried over from year to year is to clear the ground; with all root crops that means making sure none of the crop is left in the ground. It does involve "work" but so do most elements of gardening - I think it is part of the hobby of gardening
Farmers don't use tools they use weed killer, as an organic gardener, I wouldn't advise that.
The potential for spreading blight comes from the foliage so hoeing this off, which is the normal way of dealing with weeds, is enough.
For soil-born diseases such as eelworm then diging them out the answer, when the leaves are spotted just fork out the plant.
I don't know of studies on percentages (the chance will depend on the prevalence of the disease in the previous season) but I do know that the vast majority of outbreaks of blight reported by the trade are from volunteers. The trade runs a system call bligh****ch at
www.bligh****ch.co.uk and reports outbreaks to members with the cause, the vast majority of these are volunteers.
Is that motivation enough??