Which variety of Potatoes is “considered to be totally Blight free”?
Sarpo Mira potatoes have been developed to have a high resistance to blight, available from Thompson & Morgan’s website. I tried them in a high-blight year and yes, they were better than the other sorts. How harmful the blight is depends on how far advanced the potatoes are – two years ago I lost the whole crop (not Sarpo) when early blight struck the foliage before the potatoes were big enough to be worth digging. In other years, when foliage blight has come after they’ve got to a reasonable size, I’ve just cut off the foliage to ground level and removed it, having made sure the spuds were well covered, left them for 3 weeks before digging them, and they’ve been OK. Foliage blight will only damage the spuds if you leave the foliage around for the spores to penetrate down to the tubers, or if you haven’t planted deep enough so they are exposed on or only just below the surface. Last year I bought a very large sheet of Enviromesh, 3 metres wide by the width of my plot which is 13 metres
