Farming for Self-Sufficiency

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If you haven't got a ridging plough you can simply plough your potatoes in with an ordinary plough, planting them in one furrow and then missing one furrow in the case of earlies and two furrows in the case of main crop and then planting another furrow.

On a garden scale you can either grow potatoes on the flat or in ridges, doing your work with the spade. Or we have a tool called a potato planter, common in Kent and Surrey, which is like a strange pair of tongs which you push into loose soil, drop a tuber into it, and open the tongs thus leaving the potato under the soil. The land has to be deeply dug or ploughed and well-worked for this.

Plant main crop potatoes in rows about 26 inches apart and about 20 inches in the rows. Earlies can be in rows 22 inches apart. As for your seed, you can use your own seed once at least (that is use your own small potatoes-'chats'—for—seed next year), and twice perhaps. After that, if you go on using your own seed, your yields will fall off. So you will have to buy seed. The reason for this is that seed, to be good, must be grown either north enough, or high enough, to be out of the reach of the aphids which cause certain virus diseases. If you had a patch of land over 800 feet in the south of England or Wales, you could indeed grow your own seed on it. But most people must buy their seed, at least every three years. In Britain it mostly comes from high land in Scotland; in India from Himachayal Pradesh. As for strain, everybody eventually develops their own preference. At first use what your neighbors use. Potatoes are a potash-hungry crop. Seaweed is the best manure for them—better than muck.

There is one disease that you will have to guard against, and that is blight —the disease that killed five million Irish people. In dry areas you may escape blight—in dry seasons. In wet areas you will never escape it. To guard against it you must spray, either with a modern anti-blight chemical or with old-fashioned 'Bordeaux mixture', which is made like this:

Dissolve 4 lbs. copper sulphate in 35 gallons of water in a wooden barrel (or plastic dustbins). Then take 2 lbs. freshly burned quicklime and slowly slake it with water and make it into 5 gallons of 'cream'. Pour the 'cream' through a sieve into the copper sulphate solution slowly. Make sure that all your copper has been precipitated by putting a polished knife blade in the liquid. If it comes out coated with a thin film of copper you must add more lime. Then spray on your potato tops immediately: the stuff will not keep more than a few hours. Spray the foliage well, under the leaves as well as on top. From 120 to 160 gallons are needed for an acre. The first spraying might be in the middle of June in the south of Britain, in mid-July in the Midlands, in the last week of July in the north. Another spray should be given two or three weeks later. If you do this you will probably not get blight.

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