Volunteer potatoes

I planted potatoes in my present garden for the first time last year and have dug new potato beds this year. Last years potato beds will be used for other crops.
Inevitably a few volunteer plants have sprouted from missed spuds or bits of tuber.
I know that professional growers kill these off as they can harbour blight and other deseases.
Is this a danger for me (with only 6 or so plants) or is it worth leaving them to see if I get a bonus crop?

 

Rather what I feared - thanks for the confirmation.

 

"A weed is a plant in the wrong place" Anon

 

Why should you get blight in them if you treat them the same as you do your planted ones? We always leave the volunteers, except where they interfere with other plantings. They get treated with copper sulphate like the main ones and have exactly the same chances of survival as they do. Farmers remove volunteers because they are out side the main area and are not then treated, so they do become sources of infection.

 

B*gger! I've just pulled mine up! Nice little spuds growing healthy root systems and fresh green leaves.

 

Yup, if you leave volunteers you aren't really getting crop rotation - i.e. with breaks between crops.

Not a problem until you have a disease outbreak of course, but then you have a harder problem to rectify - its all over the plot, rather than just one section.

 

Since we have now grown potatoes on every section of our veg garden, any diseases are going to be all over it anyway. And if the plants did not have blight in the first place, how can they be a source of it now? Volunteers are no more likely to cause problems than the planted ones.
Agreed about them coming up where they interfere, then they are removed, otherwise we leave them. Heavens the fields around us are full of potatoes, both planted and otherwise, if blight arrives it is as likely from them as from our own 'extras'.

 

I'm sure you understand all this, but to state my view:

If you have volunteers in every bed (for example) and then get some disease that persists in the soil, you can't grow potatoes anywhere for 4 years (or whatever length your crop rotation is).

If you grow potatoes only in the "Potato Zone" then the other, say, 3 zones in your rotation won't get any potato disease that may strike - so you can grow potatoes in them for the next three years, by which time the disease in the zone that got infected will have died out.

If you don't get any such disease there is no problem But iIf you do its much harder to eradicate them if you have potatoes in every zone, and thus every zone gets the disease.

There is also the issue that last years crop (of anything) may be harbouring a disease, only lightly infected last year, which managed to get a full head of steam up over winter, and will become rife through the plot this season :(

I have also read crop rotation advice that suggests NOT rotating anything UNTIL it gets disease. That way you are sure you have soil that has never seen a Spud to grow on next year if you need to.

 

Yes Kristen, I have come across this advice too.



It does seem to make sense-at least to me, which doesn't say that much.