When I am talking to someone about a potato plant, at some point in the conversation, they will point to a plant and describe what they are looking at as a branch. Potatoes actually don’t branch very much. Many, particularly modern varieties, don’t branch at all. When most people point to a potato “branch,” they […]
We’re celebrating with potato flowers instead of fireworks: Each flower in this picture is from a different variety.
I grow a lot of potatoes. I like to evaluate new varieties and compare them to my own and I like to make crosses with them and use them for breeding. Unfortunately, every tuber I bring into my collection is a risk. I have spent years and quite a bit of money going through my […]
Solanum maglia is a wild potato from Chile. It is kind of an oddity, because it grows in a region of South America quite some distance from both other populations of wild potatoes and from the region where domesticated potatoes were originally grown in Chile. Unlike the vast majority of wild potatoes, it is a […]
The domesticated potato (Solanum tuberosum) is divided into two major groups based on the number of sets of chromosomes: tetraploids, with four sets of chromosomes, and diploids, with two sets of chromosomes. The common potato of commerce is tetraploid. There are also hundreds, if not thousands, of varieties of diploid potatoes, but they are mostly […]
Every year, I grow many new varieties as part of our breeding program and select only a few to continue. Traditionally, I have disposed of the rest, but I regularly get requests for our breeding seconds and it started to occur to me that these might actually be a product with some demand, rather than […]
Often, when people first learn about Andean potatoes, they get excited and decide that they want to load their bag with cool potatoes the next time they travel to South America. I understand being excited about potatoes, but we need to temper that enthusiasm with some knowledge. I probably get about one email a month […]
Ken Aslet is the most common and popular variety of mashua, although it has traditionally been sold as an ornamental rather than an edible. It has never looked quite right to me, but it tested negative for the most common viruses that infect mashua in the United States. I recently tested plants more widely out […]
2019 was the first year that I offered true potato seeds of individual varieties and controlled crosses in addition to our standard TPS mixes. I was curious to see if there would be much interest in these. Some of the top sellers were predictable, ranking as they have for years, but others surprised me. I […]
I start thousands of true potato seeds every year. You would think that I would be an expert by now, but my results suggest otherwise. One of the biggest problem areas for me is starting older TPS. I grow a lot of genebank accessions that are often decades old and they just don’t germinate as […]