POTASH AND POTATO BLIGHT.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXIV, Issue 23, 20 September 1912, Page 7

POTASH AND POTATO BLIGHT.

Experiments recently carried out at llothamstead throw important light on the effect of fertilisers and potato blight. The potatoes in a particular field were repeatedly and carefully .sprayed with Bordeaux mixture. The dates of the successive applications were as follon;f June 27th, July 7th, August 2nd, 3rd, and 10th. Early in August it was noticed that the leaves of all the no-potash potato plants were beginning to blight, while the foliage of all the plots to which potash had been annually applied still appeared to be practically unaffected. The blight has made rapid progress on each of the. five no-potash plots, while the foliage of the vines upon all the ot'ier plots for the most part ripened normally. Practically all the leaves on the no-potash plots were dead by the end of August, at which date there was still considerable foliage on the other plots. There was no decay of the tubers, however, on any of the plots, but the marked inferiority in yield on the no-potash plots was, no doubt, in considerable measure due to the relatively early death of the foliage. George Yille, the celebrated French agricultural chemist, found in bis experiments that the suppression of potash reduced the crop of potatoes from 9 tons 16 cwt to 4 tons 4 cwt, and wrote on the subject:— "Whenever soil does not receive potash, or where it gets no manure, the plants are poor and stunted, with withered and dry leaves, and that, too, when the other plants are still in a state of luxuriant growth the tubers become wrinkled, withered, and reduced in size, their preserving being almost impossible. The lack of potash in the soil is coincident with the potato disease, whence wo may draw the conclusion that when plants are deprived of their chief mineral constituent, and consequently one of the most essential elements of their existence, they become a prey to inferior organisms, such as microscopic fungi." Add Midlothian election ?pro,d ist?