Field Study's Man in E17 reports from the last day of the 2013 potato harvest

Potato Patch 22/9/13

The afternoon of Sunday 22nd September found Field Study's Man in E11 finishing off the 2013 potato harvest - sorting through the remaining potato tyre towers and 'baskets'. The yield from the tyre towers (or stacks) has been disappointing. We may have over watered the plants. The 'baskets' - a sort of open compost heap hobbled together with scraps of wire mesh, wood and metal posts - were equally unproductive and this may be because we did not earth up the potatoes enough. The baskets were soon smothered by bindweed and the shade and competition for nutrients from this prodigious weed probably hindered the potatoes. 

The most disappointing 'basket' (above) yielded 4 large potatoes (from 3 seed potatoes) amounting to a weight of a couple of pounds. 

Our total potato yield was 130-140Kg (286-308Ib) from an area of c. 26 sq metres (280 sq feet) - grown in a medium of compost and straw over a heavy clay sub soil. The raised beds were 30-40cm deep. We expected more than 1.1Ib per square foot although our small and informal collective is now certainly well supplied with potatoes provided they keep. Some of the potatoes have small holes in them which, upon preparation for cooking, turn out to be the entry points for small grey green slugs devouring the potatoes from the inside. Despite many of the haulms not having died off, the potatoes probably needed to be pulled sooner to have avoided such extensive slug damage to the crop. There is still surplus to sell to cover some of the costs of cultivation including some 'new' scaffolding boards.

In the week we have been clearing the potato haulms and lifting the spuds, the remaining 'baskets' and Jerusalem Artichoke patch appeared to have become a refuge for ousted shield bugs. Our harvesting of the potato 'field' had quite a dramatic or drastic effect on the amount of vegetation in the area - and with the clearance, there was a substantial loss of habitat.

Here, below, we have shield bugs each in territorial occupation of leaflets in the compound leaves of the remaining potato plants. For a brief and terrifying moment I imagined all the sounds of their sucking were greatly amplified - a most excruciating din that might have led one to believe there was a giant super-shield bug sucking one's mind out. I wonder if the shield bugs (if that is indeed what they are) pictured are of the same species.

Shield bugs appear to have a complex presence in the taxonomic ranks, for they don't just have a family; they have a 'super-family' - comprising 15 families of 7000 species worldwide. In mainland Britain there are 5 families and 37 species, of which our shield bugs may be

Nezara viridula - Southern Green Shieldbug?

It could be there are the instars of both the Common Green Shieldbug and Southern Green Shieldbug (or neither) on the same plant. 

There was not long to admire and ponder the intricacies of species differentiation for other mouth parts of a distinctly gripping (and accompanying stinging) nature were at work at my flesh where I stood. It was not only shield bugs we had dispossessed for the ants were on the move.

Below is a short observation of a potato most likely to have been burrowed by slugs then occupied by ants as a nest/nursery.