The great Les Hallais potato famine

My potatoes have not done well this year, and I'm not sure why.  The leaves of all the plants slowly went yellow, curled up and died, but there were no signs of mildew or any other kind of infestation, rot or infection.  It looked like the plants couldn't draw up water fast enough to cope with the intense heat waves we had in recent weeks.

Louis up the road had a good crop (he was proud to show me) of the Désirée variety of pink-skinned spuds, and he never waters his.  Ho hum.  I got about one or two potatoes per plant, 7 kilos in total, probably worth about what I paid for the seed potatoes in Spring.

P.S.  I think my potatoes might have black dot.  Anita said last year that there were some black dots on the skin of the potatoes, and that you had to take off a thicker layer of peel to get rid of them.  This year there were many more.  I'm going to have to stop putting potato peelings on the compost heap, and plant first early spuds next year.  I will also be rotating the plantings to try to minimise this problem.