Potato Review

www.potatoreview.com POTATO REVIEW NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 47 VARIETIES “ ese are all good blight resistant varieties. Alouette and Carolus have been around for some time, Twinner is a bit of a dual-purpose, high dry matter variety and Twister is a high yielding white baker. Levante is exceptionally good on taste with a very good skin nish; it is also high yielding and we have great hopes for that one on the Continent. “Jacky is a new salad variety which has only just been named this year,” Alex continued. “It has very much a Maris Peer shape and where conventionally grown in one or two places this season we’ve seen tubers numbers in excess of two million per hectare. Beyoncé is a blight resistant crisper. It has long dormancy and it is a low acrylamide variety. Once again, this one has only just been named so it’s fairly early doors and we’ve barely done any trials with it but the idea behind these plots is to give people an idea of how the varieties look in the eld. “We have noticed that we’ve had a yield penalty because the plots were grown near trees but looking at them today [early September] you can see that Levante still has plenty of haulm as does Carolus, which is a well-established organic variety. It is generally a very strong crop and you can pick it out by its darker leaf. Twinner and Twister have senesced on their own in this trial which can be a blessing from an organic grower’s point of view. e eld crop is Agria with two rows at the back of the trial plots being Lugano which is a new Agrico chipper.” Alex pointed out that all varieties coming out of the Dutch company’s breeding programme are assessed early on for blight resistance – if they don’t have it they are dropped. “With the pressures that growers face nowadays this is a key factor,” he observed. “We’re likely to lose more and more chemicals and we just need to be growing potatoes a bit greener, so we need to have varieties to help growers do that.” Salad selection Moving on from the organic plots Alex stopped rst at Agrico’s salad selection. “Bellanita is exclusive to Branston and it’s doing fantastically well in Tesco’s Finest packs,” he said. “ en we have Jacky again with its round tubers so here we have both Charlotte and Maris Peer equivalents.” ➜ ‘Bellanita is exclusive to Branston and it’s doing fantastically well in Tesco’s Finest packs.’ Carolus Alouette Beyonce Levante Bellanita Jacky