Potatoes - Blackleg disease?

Some of my tatty plants are looking rather poorly. The base of the stems have gone black and mushy on a couple of them, and the leaves are curling. The rest of the plants look normal.

Should I take any action?

 

I had to look this one up, having never come across it before. A plot holder on my site may have a similar thing from his description he gave me yesterday.

Steve...

 

I've only ever had blackleg on my spuds once and it was the one time when I was tempted to plant shop bought potatoes. Because I wanted some very large seed potatoes to grow giant spuds for the village show (giant seed spuds + correct methods = giant spuds for the show) but couldn't get any very large Estima tubers from garden centres. So I bought some massive Estima bakers from Asda, planted those and they all got blackleg which got into the tubers and destroyed them. I subsequently found out they were one of the most susceptible varieties and there's no treatment other than dig up ASAP.

The weather this year seems to be helping all sorts of nasty deseases.

 

Thanks all. I'm going to dig up the affected plant in a minute after I've had my cuppa.

I must confess, these were shop bought spuds that had sprouted. We've planted them in a spot where the disease (if it is blackleg) won't cause long term problems, as its in a flower bed away from everything else. We only put spuds there because at the time we had nothing else ready to go in that spot.

The top growth wont be getting composted. It will be burnt.

I don't think blackleg is as serious as blight. I think I read that blackleg is a bacterial disease rather than fungal, and as such is less contagious and can't survive without a host for anywhere near as long.

 

Just dug up two poorly looking plants. Luckily we did get a few new potatoes out so its not a total loss.

As I dug, it became immediately apparent that the ground is not ideal for spuds. I did dig quite a lot of organic matter in before I planted, but as I dug just now, it was just a waterlogged mud bath. The bed is in one of the more shady spots too, so I guess a combination of factors combined to make it ideal for diseases rather than spuds.

 

Did unions get their names for strikebreakers just from potato diseases, blackleg & scab, or did they use any other vegetable pathogens?

 

Oh no....think i may have it too.....the base of a couple of plants have turned to mush...I've got them out now....a few spuds on the end of them but so disapointed ...does that mean the lot of them are going to go the same way

 

I've seen it once before. Not enough to know what I'm on about obviously, but that one time, I had no issues at all with the rest of the plants after removing the suspect ones.

 

I used to see it a lot on the farm, it comes in the seed and is encouraged by cool and wet weather, theres nothing you can do accept pull out the diseased plants and definately don't keep the tubers for seed next year.