Potatoes

A few of my potatoes have flowers on do i wait for them to die before i pick them, or am i supposed to pick the flower out! sorry to sound so thick but this is my first time for growing anything.

 

Hi Blue1952 No you leave the fruit on them as they having no bearing on the crop you will get underneath the foliage{Haulm}The flowers will turn to small green fruit like a cherry tomato,but you need to wait a bit longer.If you have earlies in then it won't hurt to have a gentle scratch in the soil at the base of the plant,to see what there is under there,but it will probably be another couple of weeks befroe you have any spuds to harvest...Good Luck

 

Take care with the fruits, when they ripen they do look like tomatoes, but they are very very poisonous.

 

I read somewhere recently that if you remove the flowers from your potato plants you get a bigger crop. No reason was given, I suppose it would be that the energy expended would go into the spuds.

 

I've heard the same Liz.
The reason that I was told is that the plant stops growing once its produced fruit, by removing them you stimulate the plant into making more growth and so keep the plant growing longer to produce more spuds.
Its only a suggestion for main crop varieties, which probably wont be fruiting yet anyway.
Wether it works or not I'm not sure, but there are a lot of varieties that dont actually set seed, so there could be something in it.

 

Always a healthy discussion point this.

I always work to a time scale before I even think of harvesting, totally regardless of flowers on foliage. Not all varieties will produce flowers.

Earlies take about 100 days to mature, maincrop between 120 & 130 days.

Works for me.

And as Palustris stated, the tom like fruits are poisonous!