Ok, so most years I get a couple but this year has been pretty prolific, and my potatoes have produced about 5-8 berries on most plants.
As the plant is part of the nightshade family like tomato it should grow from seeds in these berries. I’m wondering who has had a go at growing potatoes from berries and does it produce potatoes the following year or does it only create tubers in it’s second year.
I fancy giving some berries a go, to see the results next year
Goggle "True potato seeds" TPS - there's lots of info on what to do. You can even name your new potato with some crazy name of your choosing!
Ok so the berries are basically from a Tetraploid potato variety and each seed could create a new variety, am I understanding that correctly?
Seems fascinating while also insanely confusing. I’m happy to give them a little space and experiment if it means I might get some weird and wacky colours shapes and flavours. I had two separate varieties intermingled anyway. Duke of York and international kidney so there will probably be some mixed coloured offspring from the berries. Cheers V.
This is the confusing part, how on earth do you decipher text like this.
inheritance implies the random pairing of four homologous chromosomes at meiosis, and in a highly heterozygous outbreeding species results in a large number of possible allelic combinations at a single locus.
Why can they say if you attempt to mix two tomato like berry plants together you are actually mixing both sets of parent plants so the resulting seeds could have any number of variables inherent in each parent. As a diploid true potato has 24 chromosomes and a Tetraploid potato has 48, theoretically you might have 96 possible individual traits, and upto 2304 potential distinctly different potato offspring.
Unfortunately as the diploid parentage of International kidney and red duke of York appear to be unknown I might be mating cousins, or worse still siblings!!! (You may not marry that boy).
I saved seeds the other year from a un-named purple potato I'd had given me and forgot all about them. Will have to check if I still have the seeds.
Read a fascinating article about potato breeding last night.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/...ial-potato
This was a look at how science is trying to overcome the inherent difficulty in breeding new potatoes. Currently it can take upto 15 years to find a potato with all the traits required for a particular climate or to be resistant to a certain disease and to breed sufficient tubers for commercial production.
There is a Dutch company trying to inbreed a potato to make the seed and potato identical. As this offers much cheaper manufacture for developing countries.
What I found most fascinating is how they have spend the last 10 years hunting down the 109 wild potatoes to attempt to find new genetic material that will cope with pests and diseases in hotter and more humid weather.
In a couple of days I’ve gone from not truly understanding the purpose of TPS, to wanting a wild seed variety from Brazil that is weedy but grows in both periodic wet and drought hot conditions and has little hairs to resist Insect attack. It might only be the size of a poppy plant but how cool is that a plant that laughs at blight.