Growing Potatoes from True Seed

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.

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