The potato harvest in Ontario is progressing well but did have to stop early some days this week due to high daily temperatures, Ontario Potato Specialist Eugenia Banks, says in an email on Sept. 25.
“To keep a healthy crop in storage, pulp tuber temperature should not be above 18 C when trucks arrive to the storages,” Banks says in the email.
About 40 per cent of the chip stock has been harvested, Mark VanOostrum with WD Potato, says. In the Simco-Delhi area, Joe Lach is expecting they’ll be done harvest by Thanksgiving.
“There are a lot of odd-shaped potatoes and a lot of internal problems in the late crop. Grade out is high. This is the result of a hot, dry summer, or as Joe put it ‘the wrath of nature,’ ” Banks writes.
Banks herself has noticed a higher than usual incidence of common scab due to the hot, dry weather, black leg and soft rot in low spots, hollow heart in the Atlantic variety with about 65 per cent of medium and oversized tubers affected in her variety trial in the Alliston area, Pink Eye and leak at low incidence and second growth.
