0:00
Hello plant people, how are you guys doing today? If you're near out here, my name is Ashley and I like to take science and apply to all things plants and today, yes, we are in the kitchen, but not because we're cooking, because my plant room is not yet ready. So I'm actually changing kind of the backdrop for my winter broadcasting area, I guess you could say. I don't know what you call it, but I'm like, there's plants all over the floors, all the stories, like I can hardly like walk in
0:26
Ella's living in like a little oasis right now but anyways I digress. I have a video for you
0:32
on what the heck is going on with my potatoes. So I have two different varieties that I planted this
0:40
year. I have the reds and then I have these yukons I believe they are. So you can see I have this
0:47
kind of blotchiness on them. So on the white ones it's kind of like this black and then on these
0:54
wands it's like a brown scabbing so i actually wanted to go over what the heck these guys are
1:02
how to identify them and if they'll store what the heck if they're safe to eat that sort of thing
1:08
so essentially what those are called are lenticles so essentially those are called lenticles they are
1:15
pores on our potatoes surface now the type of potato you have will indicate how many lenticles
1:22
are present on the potato and it can range. So specific species may have a handful of them
1:29
while others could have a couple hundred. It's actually the site where gas exchange happens
1:34
between the atmosphere and the plant itself. Now lenticles don't have to just be on potatoes
1:39
We can see them on trees very often and a number of other plants It just potatoes in this case These ones are slightly enlarged so lenticles on potatoes or any sort of root veg will happen if the plant is unable to
1:54
exchange the amount of oxygen the plant needs to survive so in an oxygen deprived environment
2:02
we will end up with swollen lenticles because they swell in order to allow enough oxygen into
2:09
the plant for the gas exchange that needs to take place so uh swollen lenticles look a little bit
2:16
larger and they're more pronounced otherwise typically speaking you won't see lenticles so
2:21
when we get swollen lenticles in an oxygen deprived environment this is usually caused by
2:28
over watering or too much water in the environment so these guys are grown outdoors in the ground
2:33
they're grown in a place at the farm where I don't go out very often so I'm
2:39
relying on Mother Nature to do the watering for me or my father-in-law to
2:43
do watering for me and in some cases Mother Nature just does what it wants
2:48
and there was a period of time right around before these guys were going to
2:52
be harvested where it rained and it rained and it rained and I'm sure that that semi waterlogged soil combined with a plant that was starting to slow down
3:00
and not use as much of that water resulted in my swollen lenticles so if
3:06
you have this issue you need to obviously look at the conditions of your
3:10
soil whether or not you over watered or if it's just mother nature did the job
3:14
that it needed to do and unfortunately it was at the wrong time for your plant
3:18
so the lenticle is swollen and you go to dig the potato up and you see white
3:24
lesions this is a sign that the lenticle just literally had swole and that it hasn yet scabbed over A scabbed over lenticle is going to look like this It going to look like a scab on the surface of your potato now an infected lenticle
3:40
Meaning a lenticle that had dried that was had opened and didn't dry properly
3:46
It's going to be black. So I have one have one infected one here
3:54
So on the white potatoes, they look like they're infected, but they're not black
3:58
They are just simply scabbed. However, if you look at this mushiness, that is maybe possibly a sign of a lenticle issue
4:09
meaning that the lenticles were what caused kind of this. I actually think was struck with a shovel
4:14
But this here is like a black blotch and it has a little bit of give to it
4:20
that's a sign of a lenticle that actually got infected meaning it wasn't
4:24
able to scab over before infection set in now an infected one that looks like
4:30
this compared to you know this which is not infected it's just a scab with
4:36
nothing around it this here needs to be eaten up very quickly it's not going to
4:42
store which is completely fine we have a ton of potatoes so the option here for
4:48
is to either cook with this normally it's not going to hurt me whatsoever and
4:53
the actual infection is very subsurface it's maybe a millimeter or two in depth
4:59
I could literally just skin it and you wouldn't even notice that this had any
5:03
sort of infection on it whatsoever I can dry this and powderize it to make like
5:08
Idaho mashed potatoes or I can can it so again I going to skin it and then you can just pressure can these as needed and then they ready to use whenever you need So you do need to process these ones sooner rather than later because that spot is just going to
5:24
continue to grow and it's just going to continue to get mush. If you have properly cured your potato
5:29
and you had lenticle spot and you put it in a semi warm place, you don't want to put these into
5:36
storage yet. You want to keep it around 10-15 degrees Celsius, put a fan on them so I have
5:42
these in my basement with a fan on them and this one has scabbed over really
5:46
really well there's no soft spot on it you really have to feel up your potatoes
5:51
when you do you go to store them and I'm gonna do a video on my other channel
5:56
it's more like homesteading vlog style about actually my process for getting
6:03
these so that they're storage ready but this one is going to survive storage absolutely no issues so the key here is that lenticles are not dangerous it's
6:11
just swelling of pores that are naturally found on our potatoes surface if
6:15
we're able to cure these properly the lenticles ultimately will scab over and
6:21
shrink up and not allow for any pathogens or bacteria to get inside of
6:25
the potato if they do enter the potato after a 20-day curing process that's kind
6:30
of my barometer there you want to process those potatoes as they start to
6:36
look bad and get them you know into a usable form asap because those will not
6:42
store in cold storage properly but the moral of story here is that sometimes
6:46
this is completely not preventable based on your environment and what you're
6:50
working with if you have a clay soil that maybe retains too much moisture you
6:54
could definitely work on soil structure that sort of thing but ultimately
6:58
harmless just looks weird and completely edible I'll talk to you guys next time
