Harvesting potatoes - what are the different marks on the skin and the causes

When you harvest your new potatoes you may be lucky and find that the ones you dig up have a perfect skin and are unblemished. However, sometimes you will find that some of the potatoes that you dig up have marks on the skin: there are different things that can cause these marks but the good news is that mostly your potatoes can still be eaten and the taste and enjoyment of them will not be affected.


Here is a list of the things that can cause 'appearance problems' in your potatoes.

1. Potato Scab,  this usually looks like thickened areas of potato skin, it stops the potato from looking as 'pretty' but you can still eat and enjoy them.
2. Slug damage to potatoes.  A potato damaged by slug attack will have holes in it and if the damage is severe it may ruin the potato.  Though the slugs enter the potato through the skin and the holes are small as they feed inside the potato they eat away at it. Main crops are more likely to suffer than the earlier harvested type of potato. The most likely soil type to suffer from slug damage is heavy wet soil so in a year of heavy rain damage of this type is more likely to happen. The longer the potato is in the soil the more damage will happen, so prompt harvesting in such cases is a good policy. If you see a keel slug it is a different shape to 'normal' garden slugs. If you throw infested potatoes away it is best not to discard them on the compost heap.
3. Wireworm damage to potatoes.   Wireworm tend to be a problem  when a former grassed area is turned over to growing potatoes, so new vegetable plots often suffer from this potato 'problem'. The sign of wireworm is narrow tunnels  through the potatoes. You may find that by the time you come to plant that area again ( if you use a crop rotation plan, which is a good idea) you will have less of a problem. 
4. Eelworm, Potato Cyst Eelworm  Potato plants will suffer from withering leaves and dying down early. You need to destroy the plants and do not plant potatoes in that area of the garden in future.

Blight is one of the worst potato diseases but that really needs a topic all to itself.