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Blog, potato (Solanum tuberosum)
The Highland Potato with Its Own Song
Solanum ajanhuiri is a native Andean potato, grown at the highest elevations suitable for cultivation (around 13,000 feet) in Bolivia and Peru, where it can survive due to its frost and drought resistance. There is a Bolivian folk song for the planting of this potato, given here from Huaman (1980), after translation from Aymara to Spanish to English:
Women:
I am the young Ajawiri
Daughter of the great chief
I laugh at everything
For I have flocks of llamas
And stores of chuño
For I am a woman of courage
Men:
Are you that maiden?
Like the potato blossom
Always beautiful
In the wind and the sun
Women like a flower bud
Smile, smile
Violet flower, smile
And do not cry later
When the frost kisses you
Women:
What frost! What hail!
I am the Ajawiri flower
I laugh at the snow
Pirouetting in the wind
I am the young Ajawiri
Men:
Dance, dance, maidens
Spin, spin, sisters
We’ll give you a draught
In a golden cup
We’ll give you a draught
In a silver cup
Then we’ll turn to the right and
Turn to the left
Spin, spin, sisters
Women:
Come away, come away walking
To the village of Ajawiri
Men:
Sisters, let us go
Beautiful potato flowers
All:
Singing, singing
Come away dancing
Spinning, spinning
Come away dancing
I just found 3 pods of potato berries on one of my plants. This brought me here!!! I’m so excited to think I have TPS that I can actually plant.
Q. If the pods are on a red potato plant will you get red potatoes from the seeds? If I understand you correctly, the potato grown from TPS is a new potato or is it a new variety of potato??? Thanks for your help
The genetics involved are not completely straightforward. If you grow enough seeds, you will definitely get some red potatoes. It is also likely that you will get white potatoes and often more whites than reds. We would have to know the parents of your variety to have a better idea of how the different colors would segregate. Each plant grown from seed is a new variety. Good luck!
I have a post that discusses the genetics of potato color.
Is there such a thing as an Ur potato? I’ve checked Ochoa’s book, Hawkes and the CIP, but none give a clear answer. Do there seem to have been several that appeared at once? Can research tell from going backwards w DNA? Thanks for your help!
By “Ur,” you mean an original domesticated potato? If so, probably not. The earliest domesticated potatoes are thought to have emerged from the Solanum brevicaule complex of wild potatoes, becoming the earliest stenotomum type (high dormancy diploid) potatoes. This was probably an ongoing process that has continued to this day.
Thanks. I meant an original wild potato, one the early Quechua would have first tasted the tiny bitter tubers of, and then begun to domesticate. And that most/all the andigena contain some DNA of.
Yes, that would be the members of the Solanum brevicaule complex, which are principally Solanum brevicaule and S. candolleanum. They are very closely related and may not have been as distinguishable as separate species at the time when the domesticated potato first began to separate out.