Not just cloning potatoes via planting roots, but actually harvesting seed from the fruits and planting them!
It’s a real treasure hunt to pull seed-grown potatoes, as the diversity is amazing. When you plant tubers, you get exactly the same thing you planted. With seeds, you are playing the lottery (but with much better success)!
I actually just bought a book on potato breeding.
The topic has been of interest to me for some years, but I haven’t been able to do anything with it. Potatoes refused to grow on our old homestead in the tropics.
In North Florida we had some potatoes set seed for us, but most years they don’t produce any fruit. We didn’t save them, either, as we were working on other projects.
As Lofthouse explains in his video, failure to set seed is a problem with varieties that have been propagated for many generations via cloning rather than sexual reproduction.
I’ll watch for fruits this year in the potato patch. We are growing five varieties – perhaps one of them will be vigorous enough to fruit.
2 comments
I have also been interested in this.
You may already know of Cultivariable, it’s a great resource for info and also to purchase True Potato Seeds from current breeding projects.
I have also purchased TPS as well as ‘perennial potatoes’ grown and selected from seed from Oikos Tree Crops. Oikos is another great place for info, unfortunately they now only offer seasonal bulk purchases at high prices.
The book looks really interesting. Hopefully yall get seeds!
I’m glad that you are experimenting with potatoes from true seed. Potatoes are tasty, nutritious, and a great calorie source for survival gardening. The problem though, for Florida gardeners, is that potatoes that are vegetatively propagated would likely not be long-term sustainable, in a Florida survival garden. Here I specifically refer to the fact that potatoes from a spring crop would likely not survive a Florida summer (un-refrigerated as in a no-electricity survival situation) and hence no vegetative propagation in the following Fall.
True seed potatoes get around this limitation, as dried seeds would survive the summer un-refrigerated. There is also the bonus of the genetic lottery that grow-from-seed represents.
On a different note, peanuts would be a valuable crop for a Florida survival garden. Just be ready to shoot the squirrels when the time comes. (Peanuts are great for vegetarians, and if you are non-vegetarian, you can cook and eat the squirrels that attack your crop.)