Sarpo Tominia: the 17th harvest

I’ve been growing the blight resistent potato Sarpo Tominia every year since 2004 and it’s still going strong, showing no sign of lack of vigour, continuing in full growth right up to the first heavy frosts with fantastic yields. In the UK, this variety was deemed too similar to Sarpo Mira to be continued. However, my observations are that Tominia yields a bit better than Mira here, probably because it is a bit earlier. This makes little difference in the UK, but could be significant here in Norway where growth is stopped by early frosts. 
Norwegian Seed Savers (KVANN) administer a national program offering 10 virus cleaned varieties from our national list of some 80 traditonal varieties each year. Members are not allowed to pass these varieties on to others, but can save their own seed potatoes. This is to reduce the spreading of virus and other diseases. We will reoffer most varieties of interest after some years.  For the same reason we have also included other popular non-commercial varities in the program and Sarpo Mira has been included for some years now. Members are sent 3 mini-tubers of each variety and these are then used to produce seed potatoes for the following year.
We will now be including Sarpo Tominia in the programme and hope to be able to carry out comparative trials between these two varieties in a couple of years. Here is my harvest yesterday. These were grown in a very shady part of the garden with maximum 1 hour direct sunlight in summer and none when the tubers are forming!

2 thoughts on “Sarpo Tominia: the 17th harvest”

  1. I hope someone can help me! I have grown Sarpo Torminia annually since about 2000 when they first appeared in Scotland. I also got some Axona. This year my seed potato nursery was dug up and the Torminia and Axona got mixed up and indistinguishable. I am keen to get hold of a couple of Torminia and bring them on again for future years. I found torminia was a better cropper than Axona and was moderately slug and eelworm resistant.
    I will happily cover any cost of postage.

    1. I’m in Norway and I don’t believe it’s allowed to send potatoes without a phytosanitary certificate. In any case, we are in the process of cleaning this variety for viruses, so not currently available.
      Did you compare with Sarpo Mira? You could use that one as a good alternative!

Leave a Reply to Stephen Barstow Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *