Open pollinated, heritage, seed saving are the key terms needed. Why would the EU make such a stupid, shortsighted, unpopular decision? Silly question eh. Money, power, selfish greed, profits rule, the commons drool. On our little farm we grew Ecuadorian finger potatoes for nearly 20 years. They are open pollinated, excellant producers, have very high nutritional numbers and taste fantastic. It's getting to be time to prepare the beds for potato planting. All potatoes want well turned, manured and composted soil. Potatoes don't like lime or woodash. Try to turn the soil about one shovel deep.
Potatoes do equaly well in either a row type setup or in mounds. Ours were in rows as it seemed easier to harvest them that way in the fall. Plant can your potatoes anytime in April in our climate, but anywhere you can plant them once your soil has warmed up a little and isn't at all muddy. Plant them with their eyes up. If you've had to cut your seed potatoes be sure to let them sit out in a dry place and in the air to dry their newly cut areas for at least a day. Like all seed, potatoes want to be planted at about twice the depth that the seed is thick. Finger potatoes are average about a inch so they want to be two inches deep [from the top of the potatoe to the top of the soil. Obviously larger potatoes would be planted deeper.
There's probably going to be one or two light weeding sessions before the potato plants fom a canopy with their leaves, after that just pull anything that grows above the canopy [or not, i pull some highly invasive stuff but mostly not]. Soon the plants are mature and start flowering. During or after flowering my potatoes often got blown over. Once the plants look like they're dying it's time to dig up one easily accessible plant or two and see what's going on. This is often mid-late August here and the finger potatoes you find are still small, white and totally delicious.
Underground the tubers continue to expand and mature, we would just continually harvest them as needed until about mid-October. Then we'd try to get them all out before any sign of real cold, or in our area big rain. We'd lay out our October harvest on newspapers on the veranda, out of the rain but still in the sun and open air. Once the spuds and the dirt on them became totally dry we'd put them in large burlap type bags for winter storage. The cooler, dryer, darker your storage the better. Enjoy your stash through the winter and kinda check through them as the season goes along and throw out into the compost any that get soft and/or wierd.We'd save the hardest most perfectly formed potatoes as next year's seed. Soon spring will creep over the horizon, the robins will be back and it'll be time to prepare your beds again. We rotated our stuff every year so we'd always have a new bed and various volunteers scttered through the other beds. Open pollinated, heritage, seed saving, that's where the miracle is.
EU Authorizes GMO Potatoes
The European Commission on Tuesday approved the cultivation of genetically-modified potatoes, but environmentalists and some European ministers slammed the so-called "frankenfoods".
