gee looks like early blight to me on those spuds, my experience is no amount of copper sulfate or other nasty chemicals will help the spuds now. we get this problem here on the wet coast and planting very early and harvest early is the best strategy,,,,, as for the tomatoes, they have to be kept out of the rain here, we have lots of heat units but we have to keep those tomato leaves dry. my guess is the tomato plants will out grow this as your summer arrives, i often snip off and destroy infected leaves, ofcourse some varieties have more resistance,,,, if your spuds die down, enjoy those early nugget potatoes, mmmmmmm

Sweet taters are similar but different. You do not hill them as they grow but instead make your hill first before you plant your slips. Sweet taters are also much more tolerant of clay soils being able to push down through as a thin root and wedge it as they expand. Of course this ability differs to varying degrees by cultivar and like all root crops looser is always better over all. Also unlike "Irish" taters you don't plant the potato or cut pieces but instead plant sprouts or slips that form from sweet potatoes that are allowed to sprout either in the classic sweet potato half suspended in water with toothpicks in a mason jar or in a sprouting bed, usually damp sand in a cold frame. Cold in the case of sweet taters is a misnomer as unlike regular taters which come from way up high in the cold Andes mountains, sweet taters hail from the lowland tropical bottomlands and they want heat and lots of it so plant these in May or later as long as there is time in the season for them as most need a long season to size up. They also like it a little wetter than regular spuds especially when first set out as slips. When I was a kid we made our ridges then wet them down to a mud pie state before setting the slips for a very dirty day in the field. Today I do it by making a ditch down the top of the ridge prior to setting the slips and then set my slips about 10-12 inches apart in the row and bury them until only the top leaves are showing and then fill the ditch to the brim with water. The key is to never ever let the slips dry out for the first week or so until they have been able to establish roots. Soaker hoses are a God send compared to the days of toting buckets of water to the field. If you can time your planting for an overcast day, or even better week, so much the better. They, too, like a good side dress once established but do not over do it as like the others you'll get great tops at the expense of roots. I just want good thick foliage for supressing weeds and photosynthesis and no more. Let them stress ever so slightly later in the season to send more good stuff to the roots. Like has been said they do need lots of room compared to the non vining irish kind if you're growing the vining type of sweet potatoes. Some can go over six foot or more but I generally reserve tolerating vines only on my melons and pumpkins so I opt for bunch or semi bunch versions myself. I've almost completely settled on the newer semi bunch Covington cultivar but still alot some space to others. My Covingtons go into two one hundred foot rows as my main sweet potato for year round use. herboil, just a note on letting sweet potato vines grow up instead of out. With some cultivars, centennial comes to mind, you will lose nearly half your crop as many cultivars will root at the nodes and make roots (potatoes) there. Me personally, I despise having to hunt and peck to dig sweet potatoes all over God's creation so those cultivars are very low on my list even though I personally like the taste of centennials. For me and mine I like to find my taters exactly where I planted them.

You'll receive a variety of responses, that I know. Most of the PL varieties I've grown have had stronger foliage cover, which is an advantage, and that's most, but not all. My experience is that PL varieties are better able to withstand the four most common foliage diseases of Early Blight ( A. solani), Septoria Leaf Spot, both fungal, and Bacterial Speck and Bacterial Spot. I've suggested that it's possibly b'c the leaf cuticle might be thicker than that of RL leaves which would make attachement of the pathogens to the leaf surface more difficult. I have no proof for that at all, but my observation has been that when it gets near Fall I see my RL varieties going down with the foliage disease of the season but the PL ones keep going. All of them? No, but many of them. And there will be some folks who will say that they see no difference at all as to foliage disease susceptibility, but then again, it depends on any particular season since the foliage pathogens are spread by wind and rain, and some years can be foliage pathogen free as compared to other years, even with the same variety. Taste? There are some great tasting PL's and some great tasting RL,s so I don't see that as a reason to grow mainly PL's, and indeed they are far fewer than RL's in number. What has bothered me I'll admit, is so many varieties that are known to have PL variants of an original RL variety. Let's say we have the variety Stop Snowing, which is RL, and someone finds a PL variant of that one and then calls it Stop Snowing Potato Leaf or says Stop Snowing (PL). Does that mean that the PL variant is identical to the RL original? Possibly. But there's more than one genetic mechanism that can lead to a change in leaf form and some of those DNA mechanisms can lead to changes in more than one gene, possibly several genes. The PL gene is C, which is dominant to c, its allele CC = RL, homozygous dominant Cc = RL, heterozygous cc = PL, homozygous recessive. If a variety is Cc then a single spontaneous mutation can lead to cc and all is the same except for leaf form. But there's no infomation that says variety X is Cc or CC. Some have compared the following varieties: Cherokee Purple RL Cherokee purple Potato Leaf ( found by Jere Gettle) Spudakee, also Cherokee Purple PL ( found by Bill Malin) When grown in the same season there are differening reports as to whether the Gettle and Malin ones are the same as to taste and performance and whether each of them individually are different from CP itself. There are several other examples I could use. my point? Don't necessarily assume that a PL variant of an RL original is the same until you've grown both in the same season with your conditions so that you can compare them directly and see what you think. Carolyn, an no, PL varieties are not more prone to crossing as was stated in the old literature. I and quite a few others have grown a few thousand varieties each and our collective experience is that PL's don't cross more frequently than RL's

He says a friend of his planted some Black Brandywine last year and got a mix of regular and potato leaf seedlings. He then set out only the potato leaf seedlings and got a mix of beefsteaks and teardrops. Martin set out some regular leaf seedlings and got only teardrops and refused to save a single seed since "the variety is a basket case" in his estimation. ****** Black Brandywine was discovered in the growing fields of Seeds by Design in CA which is a wholesale seed place and also produces seed on contract. At that time TGS was subcontracting out to them for some seed production, that stopped quite a few years ago, and it was Linda who found that hybrid black as best I can remember. So it was TGS that first offered it. I don't know if SBD did some dehybridization or Linda did, or they both did, but Linda thought it was true enough to offer. Craig was one of the first to grow it and I remember so clearly him telling folks that he got an RL and a PL. He said the RL looked something like Black from Tula and the PL was small fruited and was a bag of seeds. And from what I read Black Brandywine is still not all that stable, and when I have it in a list here I try hard to mention that. Do some folks get a large PL so called black beefsteak? Yes they do. A "basket case"? For those who do get two different leaf forms and two diffrent kinds of fruits, it sure sounds like it. Carolyn