Potato cyst eelworm (latin name – Globodera rostochiensis & Globodera pallida) is a serious pest of potatoes.
- Golden cyst eelworm (Globodera rostochiensis) predominates in southern Britain
- White cyst eelworm (Globodera pallida) is more common in Lincolnshire & north of Yorkshire and Lancashire.
Symptoms of potato cyst eelworm
- weak and stunted plants
- lower leaves turn yellow and then brown in mid-summer, before stems yellow & die-back
- marble sized tubers produced
- spherical white, yellow or brown cysts, up to 1mm in diameter, can be seen on the roots if the plants are carefully dug up. These are the swollen bodies of the female eelworms, and each contains up to 600 eggs that can remain viable in the soil for many years.
Treatment
- no chemical control available for the amateur gardener
- destroy infected plants & tubers
Prevention
- rotate potato and tomato planting around different parts of the garden.
- avoid returning to the same planting site for 7 years to avoid a build up of eelworm.
- remove volunteers (self-set potatoes)
- do not grow potatoes or tomatoes on infected land for at least 6 years
- test the soil for the presence of cysts when taking over a garden or allotment
- grow eelworm resistant varieties
The following potato varieties have resistance to the golden cyst nematode:
- Earlies: ‘Accent’, ‘Lady Christl’, ‘Pentland Javelin’, ‘Premiere’, ‘Rocket’, ‘Swift’, ‘Winston’
- Second earlies: ‘Cabaret’, ‘Kestrel’, ‘Nadine’, ‘Saxon’
- Maincrop: ‘Cara’, ‘Maris Piper’, ‘Maxine’, ‘Nicola’, ‘Picasso’, ‘Sante’, ‘Spey’, ‘Valor’
The following potato varieties are also able to tolerate infestation by white cyst nematode: ‘Accord’, ‘Kestrel’, ‘Maxine’, ‘Sante’, ‘Spey’ and ‘Valor’ are and produce a worthwhile crop when grown as part of a crop rotation.
Potato cyst eelworm is a serious pest of potatoes, which can be avoided by practising crop rotation in the vegetable garden..
6 Comments »
New allotment holder look to have eelworm in my first crop of potato’s
pentland javelins can you still eat the potato’s from the crop.
Comment by Sonia axcell – June 21, 2008 5:32 pm
Sonia
That is bad luck. You can eat the potatoes – cut out any obvious cysts.
Pentland Javelin is a first early, so lift the potatoes as soon as they are
big enough to eat. The longer the potatoes stay in the ground, the more damage
the eelworm will cause. So start eating them as soon as possible!
TopVeg
Comment by TopVeg – June 21, 2008 7:58 pm
Think I might have this as yellow leaves and dying off but no cysts to be
seen. Have photo but don’t know how to put it on this
Comment by Bridie – June 25, 2008 7:20 am
Bridie
Sorry to hear about your potato problem. If you attach a photo to the email we
have sent you, we will have a look.
Yellow leaves sound like potato blight at this time of year.
Look forward to hearing from you
Comment by TopVeg – June 25, 2008 7:45 am
Hello
I am from Bosnia, and I think that I have the same problem. Unfortunately I
have noticed the problem after the full vegetative seson:(
The symptoms seams to be identical, when I slice the potato, the small black
dots appears,and than it is posible to take it out with knife. It loks like
small sacs (cystas) with powder like thing inside. I doubted that it was some
sort of fungi with its spores. Do you know any posible health hazard that
comes from consuming the infected potato?
Please if so, could you conntact me at niista@yahoo.com
thank you
Comment by Mustafa – November 2, 2008 12:15 am
Mustafa
We are sorry to hear that your potatoes have got eelworm.
I have asked several commercial potato producers and also searched the net,
but cannot find any evidence about the safety of eating potatoes with eelworm.
Everyone says they think the potatoes will be OK, but no-one has any proof.
It would be sensible to cut the damaged pieces out of the potatoes if you are
going to eat them
