From The Grocer:
Allotments and gardens represent a very small total area of potato cultivation compared with the 160,000 hectares in commercial production.
However, small plots were responsible for a “disproportionate amount of overall blight pressure” in warm, wet seasons such as 2012, claimed Potato Council corporate affairs manager Maria Ball...
Potato Council chairman Allan Stevenson added: "People should be encouraged to grow their own vegetables to learn about the origins of their food, but the blight risk is real, and it would be preferable if people bought healthy, well-produced potatoes from their retailer, rather than grow their own."
The Potato Council has been working with major horticultural institutions including The Royal Horticultural Society, Garden Organic and the National Society of Allotment and Leisure Gardeners to produce a factsheet to give advice and guidance for smaller growers.
Tuesday, 16 October 2012
Is this a serious problem or just clever marketing?
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6 comments:
Did you know potatoes are slave food. Only grown when high quality food is no longer affordable in large doses.
The only reason to grow them is because wages are so low that quality food (fresh fruit, vegetables, lean meats and fish, nuts and oils) is out of reach. Same for wheat and grains.
My gardeners potato patch got blighted too this year. Shame. The other veg did pretty well though.
Yes the PC are Rent Seeking here of course.
RS, I also know that potatoes are the single greatest food of all time. Apart from the occasional blight, they are not too difficult to grow, they are easy to store for winter etc and they can be used to make chips and crisps. or indeed mashed potato, gratin, fried etc.
Is this a serious problem or just clever marketing?
Both. There is a small public goods problem in the propagation of blight in potatoes. Enough to warrant the potato council to advise and advertise their certified seed potatoes, which allotment holders can choose to ignore if they so please. Nothing inherently wrong about that.
Slave food or not, IMO potatoes need to be fried/roasted covered in some kind of animal fat, be it sour cream/butter or bacon drippings, how anyone can eat straight cooked potatoes is beyond me.
Kj, your answer is still not clear.
And yes, of course potatoes need a bit of fat on them (animal or vegetable) but if the worst comes to the worst, you can throw big ones in a fire and take them out after half an hour and the skins are a bit black and hard, but the insides taste nice and soft.
MW: it's probably true that there's more blight in allotment potatoes than commercial, largely because the latter spray more then the former, and that allotment holders can affect commercial growers slightly.
Yeah the fire-roast works.
Just saw a doccy on pre-famine Ireland, where a large proportion of the population didn't eat anything but potatoes, but because of that, huge families could survive on tiny plots. Incredibly efficient plant, but obvious risk in basing your diet on them if you were 19th century and Irish.
I've always reckoned it's not worth growing potatoes, as they are so cheap to buy, unless you grow some expensive variety like Pink Fir Apple, but then, I'm not a gardener.
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