Benefits of growing potatoes from true seed.

As a plant breeder, I am generally welcoming to diseases and pests in my garden. Because if I have a lot of pathogens/diseases/pests then it is easier to select for varieties that thrive in my garden in spite of the farmer, the soil, the viruses, the animals, the bugs, the microorganisms, the climate, etc...

I am not convinced that crop rotation in small gardens is worthwhile, because micro-organisms are readily moved around a garden by walking, or tools, or wind, or animals. And insects can move from place to place. Many of the diseases and pests we fuss over travel continental distances in a single growing season. Many insect species are killed by my cold winters, but most years, they re-arrive during summer monsoonal weather. Even on large farms crop rotation may not be all that effective. Farmer's used to think that if they rotated between corn and soybeans that they could eliminate corn root worms. Turns out that the species has learned to fly away from the corn, and leave propagules in soybean fields... So they will be ready to start eating corn as soon as the soybeans are out of the field and the corn is planted. These days, crop rotation is favoring the worms.

I grow potatoes from pollinated seeds. About 5 growing seasons ago I initiated a standard operating procedure of discarding all potato clones that do not make lots of seeds. I love how much improvement my potatoes underwent by such a simple choice.

I don't molest the skunks, coons, pheasants, turkeys, or deer that eat my corn crop. What that means in practice is that over the years, my corn has developed resistance to animal predation.

If a potato plant in my garden attracts Colorado Potato Beetles, then the plant gets culled. If a tomato plant attracts them, then the tomato gets culled. The beetles are allowed to eat as much wild solanum as they like. I don't pay too much attention to weeding the wild solanum. It's a death sentence for a beetle to get caught on a domesticated plant. Death to the beetle, and death to the plant. I can enforce that contract, because the beetles are year round residents in my garden. I influence the genetics and culture of the beetles and the genetics of the domesticated plants.

I don't use crop protection chemicals, because I want the full strengths and especially the weaknesses of my varieties to be manifest. That allows me to make more informed decisions about which plants to use as seed-crops.

For me, it's cull, Cull, CULL!

I really like genetics and will start breeding whatever I can get my hands on once I have the space. I have never had the opportunity to see potatoes grown from seed, how quickly do they send up shoots compared to cloned potatoes? I will look into trying that in the next few years. Potatoes are biennials right? So seeds would come in the second year of growth?

There is actually two gardens in the farm yard, with different growing conditions too. With the two gardens pests can have trouble moving far enough to find them. Maybe with a small garden it would not be worthwhile to rotate crops but with two large gardens it can help. I suspect the farm is at the far northern edge of the potato beetle range so one summer without their preferred food got rid of most of them.

Where I am from some farmers like to experiment with crops so a rotation might be wheat-canola-barley-peas-flax-wheat-lentils. This tends to be enough to pests of one plant out of the soil. There are also farmers that will do wheat-canola-wheat-canola, and diseases do build up there.

I would love to be able to breed plants that deer do not like but humans still like. All the deer in the area winter in a valley that is right beside the farm yard, and there is a doe that raises her fawn right in the yard every year. The cats keep the little herbivores under control in the yard.

The potatoes that I grow produce both seeds and tubers in the first growing season. Potato seeds are very small, so they are slow to get going in the spring. Tubers are huge and start up fast. With my very short growing season that means that harvest is typically larger for tuber planted clones than for seedlings. I say typically, because sometimes seedlings produce many more tubers for me than different clones planted from tubers. Some plants grown from tubers don't produce a harvest for me and die out.

Here's what the yield looked like for some potatoes grown from seeds. Each basket it the production from one plant.


Here's what the harvest looked like from single tubers in the second year: Tuber from the top row 3rd from left in the above photo.


Second row from top, All the way left.

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:
The potatoes that I grow produce both seeds and tubers in the first growing season. Potato seeds are very small, so they are slow to get going in the spring. Tubers are huge and start up fast. With my very short growing season that means that harvest is typically larger for tuber planted clones than for seedlings. I say typically, because sometimes seedlings produce many more tubers for me than different clones planted from tubers. Some plants grown from tubers don't produce a harvest for me and die out.

Here's what the yield looked like for some potatoes grown from seeds. Each basket it the production from one plant.

Here's what the harvest looked like from single tubers in the second year: Tuber from the top row 3rd from left in the above photo.

Second row from top, All the way left.

I just gotta say, those are some beautiful looking potatoes! The little green ones and the pink ones come from the same plant, right? Is there a reason for the difference in size and color? Do they taste different, too?

Thank you, also, for sharing your knowledge on potato growing. This is fascinating!

Nicole Alderman wrote:I just gotta say, those are some beautiful looking potatoes! The little green ones and the pink ones come from the same plant, right? Is there a reason for the difference in size and color? Do they taste different, too?

Thank you, also, for sharing your knowledge on potato growing. This is fascinating!

Thank you... Yes, everything in the same basket is from the same plant. The larger white/yellow/pink/red/purple things are the potato tubers. Taste varies from kind to kind, but around typical potato root taste. The little round green things are potato fruits. I typically call them berries. They have seeds inside. When fully ripe, they taste sweet, but about 1/4 fruit is enough to make me throw up.

Here's what true potato seeds look like:


And some young potato seedlings:


Here's what the potato berries looked like while still on the plant:


And a closeup of one of the baskets:


More berries and tubers:


This was one of my favorites: However it produced fewer tubers each year than
went into the ground, so it died out:

Joseph the first year I grew spuds I planted certified tubers and got hundreds of "berries" and never worried about trying to grow from true potato seed so I would be very interested how you go about it as this year I've noticed berries on my spuds again.
Thanks...Glenn.

I pick potato berries when they fall off the plant naturally, or just before the beginning of the fall frosts. Then I allow them to ripen further until a few of them start to rot, or they get soft (a month or two). Then I combine one cup of berries with 6 cups of water in a blender, and blend for 30 seconds. The seeds sink, the pulp floats. I pour off the pulp and rinse the seeds a few times with water, then dry them on a plate.

I grow potato seeds about like tomatoes. Potato seeds respond well to the wintersown method.

Oh joseph if I had only known it was that simple....Thank you very much,we love spuds and eat 'em just on every night and not having to buy in tubers would be a Godsend to our sustainable tracks.

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:

I grow potato seeds about like tomatoes. Potato seeds respond well to the wintersown method.

Which varieties did you start with?

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:I pick potato berries when they fall off the plant naturally, or just before the beginning of the fall frosts. Then I allow them to ripen further until a few of them start to rot, or they get soft (a month or two). Then I combine one cup of berries with 6 cups of water in a blender, and blend for 30 seconds. The seeds sink, the pulp floats. I pour off the pulp and rinse the seeds a few times with water, then dry them on a plate.

I grow potato seeds about like tomatoes. Potato seeds respond well to the wintersown method.

You have eaten the berries, which common lore deem to be deadly poison. Did the poison or the taste cause your vomitus reaction?
Are you concerned that you might breed a poisonous spud?
I imagine not, as your source matirial is all edible.

One other thing, could they be selected for self seeding, like ground cherries and the like?

Peter Ingot wrote:Which varieties did you start with?

I don't keep track of things like that. The fewer records I keep, the more food I am able to grow.

I have grown several hundreds of varieties of potatoes... Because they are grown from pollinated seeds, and because potatoes don't generally self-pollinate, every seed ends up being genetically unique. And I am growing tetraploid potatoes, which really messes with the ability to name a variety that is grown from seeds. From time to time, I have named one particular clone, but I generally just end up calling potatoes "white fleshed potato with purple skin", or "yellow fleshed potato", etc.

When doing swaps with people, I ask that they not bother labeling the seeds that they send. If someone collected seeds from 40 clones, I ask that the seeds all be jumbled together into the same packet of seeds. In a month of two I expect to plant about 300 varieties of potatoes, which have all been consolidated into a single packet of seeds. That was good enough for the illiterate plant breeders that domesticated potatoes. It's good enough for me.

My primary selection criteria for potatoes is the ability to make seeds. I don't find volunteer seedlings in my garden because of my cultural practices, but I get reports of people growing self-seeding potatoes.

The potato berry tasted good going down, because the berry was fully ripe and had a lot of sugar in it, but it didn't want to stay down. Green berries are too bitter to contemplate eating.

Potato poison is well behaved... It tastes very bitter in a tuber. So it's easy enough to taste if a tuber is poisonous. Offspring tend to resemble their parents. And potatoes have been domesticated for a long time, so the poisons have mostly been minimized. However, I toss out about 5% of new clones each year because they taste poisonous. Tasting for poison is among the last things that I do with a new clone. No sense tasting tubers that can be eliminated by less unpleasant tests. I would classify potato poison as mildly poisonous. And the poison is destroyed by cooking. That goes a long ways to explaining why raw potatoes are not typically used as a salad vegetable.

Joseph, thanks so much! I do have potato seeds and thought there never got to maturity because of the hard and green fruit I find!
Now I am going to keep them and sow them!
Let's see if I can convince people about the interest of doing so...

I am curious about your way to plant them.... I just made an answer to this old thread about the best way to grow potatoes, and it had few answers and no longer term feed-back....
https://permies.com/t/48075/growing-potatoes#764466

Maybe can you add something there also about the way to plant seedlings or of you sow directly etcetc?

I made a video when Joseph Lofthouse visited my potato patch..  You guys will enjoy it. I got surprisingly big harvests (up to 10 lbs per plant) and big ol' tubers.
Check it out here (less than 5 minutes, lots of potato pics).
It's part of an online course we made, Growing Modern Landraces, modernlandraces.com
I think I just convinced my potato partner to go full hog on growing from seed, for market.

This is really cool. Subbed to your channel.
Living in Fl it gets super hot and humid for normal store potatoes. Sweet potatoes are great and grow here well but most of my family prefer the other.
I’ve been able to grow store potatoes under big oak trees but my pigs found most of them when ever they broke out of there pen. But I know the results of how many pounds was able to get from one, it was not a lot of food. Tasted great
Bought the landrance gardening book cause of David’s videos and was a great read.
Would like to get potatoes where they have seed pods. Thanks for the video.
It’s crazy how many cultivars there where in central, and South America and now where stuck with like 3 main ones. The potato famine was real and horrible. It always great to have different verities to fight blights, and be adapted to our Zones and climates.

Thank you so much for this!
The question has been burning in my mind ever since I moved into farmland in the Andes and noticed the fruits on the potato plants. People I asked barely acknowledge their existence, much less believe viable plants could be grown from the seeds.

Cultivariable carries a number of TPS varieties and had information about growing from seed.  Clancy is a named TPS variety that you can get at some seed companies.  Cultivariable has a review of it and gives his opinions about it.   Highly recommend the site for anyone interested in following up on this.  
https://www.cultivariable.com/

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:As a plant breeder, I am generally welcoming to diseases and pests in my garden. Because if I have a lot of pathogens/diseases/pests then it is easier to select for varieties that thrive in my garden in spite of the farmer, the soil, the viruses, the animals, the bugs, the microorganisms,  the climate, etc...

I am not convinced that crop rotation in small gardens is worthwhile, because micro-organisms are readily moved around a garden by walking, or tools, or wind, or animals. And insects can move from place to place. Many of the diseases and pests we fuss over travel continental distances in a single growing season. Many insect species are killed by my cold winters, but most years, they re-arrive during summer monsoonal weather. Even on large farms crop rotation may not be all that effective. Farmer's used to think that if they rotated between corn and soybeans that they could eliminate corn root worms. Turns out that the species has learned to fly away from the corn, and leave propagules in soybean fields... So they will be ready to start eating corn as soon as the soybeans are out of the field and the corn is planted. These days, crop rotation is favoring the worms.

I grow potatoes from pollinated seeds. About 5 growing seasons ago I initiated a standard operating procedure of discarding all potato clones that do not make lots of seeds. I love how much improvement my potatoes underwent by such a simple choice.

I don't molest the skunks, coons, pheasants, turkeys, or deer that eat my corn crop. What that means in practice is that over the years, my corn has developed resistance to animal predation.

If a potato plant in my garden attracts Colorado Potato Beetles, then the plant gets culled. If a tomato plant attracts them, then the tomato gets culled. The beetles are allowed to eat as much wild solanum as they like. I don't pay too much attention to weeding the wild solanum. It's a death sentence for a beetle to get caught on a domesticated plant. Death to the beetle, and death to the plant. I can enforce that contract, because the beetles are year round residents in my garden. I influence the genetics and culture of the beetles and the genetics of the domesticated plants.

I don't use crop protection chemicals, because I want the full strengths and especially the weaknesses of my varieties to be manifest. That allows me to make more informed decisions about which plants to use as seed-crops.

For me, it's cull, Cull, CULL!

I love this approach. So easy. So logical!

Julia Dakin wrote:I made a video when Joseph Lofthouse visited my potato patch

Thank you for sharing yes it's worth checking out!

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:I pick potato berries when they fall off the plant naturally, or just before the beginning of the fall frosts. Then I allow them to ripen further until a few of them start to rot, or they get soft (a month or two). Then I combine one cup of berries with 6 cups of water in a blender, and blend for 30 seconds. The seeds sink, the pulp floats. I pour off the pulp and rinse the seeds a few times with water, then dry them on a plate.

I grow potato seeds about like tomatoes. Potato seeds respond well to the wintersown method.

I don't have a blender (or many electrical appliances) and would be happy to pick the seeds out by hand if this would work?

I actually got a small handful of fruits odd one of my volunteer potato plants (they come out of potato peelings and I only put the peelings in one downwind spot of the garden in case they carry disease)

Anyway I am still to have successful homegrown potatos. Although I pick local potatos with thick skins still with soil on them, or not at all, I am still afraid of passing disease to my garden.
The fruits I found had few seeds so I froze the fruits in the freezer with the intention of late winter planting (I have some dry soil put aside for this.)

Is it possible to hand pick the seeds, and do they need any treatment, or, if so is freezing as is an alternative?

I did buy a few hundred true potato seeds from the Ukraine hoping some of them might be happy in hills on top of the moraine base. (moraine being glacial rocks sand and more rocks) It is dressed with hills of pigeon manure compost (homegrown hay with spent pigeon manure in layers, usually in cardboard boxes, plus branches, maple and ash and oak leaves, pine cones: pretty acidic) with layers of aged homegrown soil attached to the less noxious weeds I use as ground cover while building new soil.)

I plan on selecting three new compost hills for this and keeping some seed.

Does anyone know how much seed I ought to be using for mini kugelkulture / windrows (8' wide, 4' high after settling, 10-20' long) I know for true kugelkulture they would be twice that bulk, but that's what I was able to accomplish in one season while waiting for surgery.

PS I learned about landrace here on permies after I ordered my seeds. I loved Joseph Lofthouse's e-book so I bought my own book and looked here, I am going to be trying landrace potatoes after having no luck growing potatoes for 20 years! I am really looking forward to this coming year (and should get my screws out by April)

Ra Kenworth wrote:

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:I pick potato berries when they fall off the plant naturally, or just before the beginning of the fall frosts. Then I allow them to ripen further until a few of them start to rot, or they get soft (a month or two). Then I combine one cup of berries with 6 cups of water in a blender, and blend for 30 seconds. The seeds sink, the pulp floats. I pour off the pulp and rinse the seeds a few times with water, then dry them on a plate.

I grow potato seeds about like tomatoes. Potato seeds respond well to the wintersown method.

I don't have a blender (or many electrical appliances) and would be happy to pick the seeds out by hand if this would work?

I actually got a small handful of fruits odd one of my volunteer potato plants (they come out of potato peelings and I only put the peelings in one downwind spot of the garden in case they carry disease)

Anyway I am still to have successful homegrown potatos. Although I pick local potatos with thick skins still with soil on them, or not at all, I am still afraid of passing disease to my garden.
The fruits I found had few seeds so I froze the fruits in the freezer with the intention of late winter planting (I have some dry soil put aside for this.)

Is it possible to hand pick the seeds, and do they need any treatment, or, if so is freezing as is an alternative?

Maybe the easiest way, works with tomatoes, is to set the ripe potato berry in a pot of potting compost to decay over winter, then help the seeds to disperse across the surface before it gets warm enough for things to germinate.
Otherwise, dropping the fruit in water and letting it rot. Pull out the skin in time. Eventually you can break the fruit open, then find your seeds swimming in the bottom: gently decant the water, first most of it, then the final drain. This process cuts through the germination inhibitor on these seeds. They're ready for drying and packing.

Anthony Powell wrote:

Maybe the easiest way, works with tomatoes, is to set the ripe potato berry in a pot of potting compost to decay over winter, then help the seeds to disperse across the surface before it gets warm enough for things to germinate.
Otherwise, dropping the fruit in water and letting it rot. Pull out the skin in time. Eventually you can break the fruit open, then find your seeds swimming in the bottom: gently decant the water, first most of it, then the final drain. This process cuts through the germination inhibitor on these seeds. They're ready for drying and packing.

Thank you for your advice! This sounds easy enough

I hope some of my potatoes will grow from my Ukrainian seeds and grow berries
that I can seed save from!

If the solution for me and my challenging conditions in growing potatoes
is landracing them, this will be the way to go.

I am too stubborn to give up because I love potatoes
especially roasted or with onions in baked fish soup.