After consulting with a few Canadian customers recently, it appears that Canada has either changed or clarified their restrictions on true potato seeds from the USA. As a result, I am opening up sales to Canada again. There were two reasons that I stopped shipping to Canada. The first was that I couldn’t ship the […]
This is the first of what will be a series of posts about potato characteristics. One of the first things that I recommend to new plant breeders is to thoroughly explore the morphology of the plants that they work with. There are some people who are able to look at the world around them naively […]
This year, I am introducing tissue culture plantlets as an option for some of my varieties. I have been working toward this as a goal since the beginning of the company. I use tissue culture to maintain varieties and clean them of diseases, but I have done this on a very small scale and with […]
Unlike most small businesses, I don’t outsource Cultivariable email to a big service provider like gmail. Instead, I actually run the server. It hasn’t always been this way, but running the mail server gives me better flexibility and offers increased privacy to customers who care about it. I take advantage of all of the options […]
Spring is around the corner and it is the time of year when I start to see a lot of discussion about growing those old, heavily sprouted potatoes that you find at the bottom of your pantry or about purchasing potatoes to plant from the grocery store because seed potatoes are so expensive. Like so […]
Update: I’ve had some questions about availability. If something shows in stock, it is in stock and you can order it. I will still be adding more as I get everything cleaned and packaged. The amounts available will definitely be smaller than usual, so I will probably sell out before spring, but I did save […]
Note: This article is focused on the USA because that is where I live. I know less about the status of GMO potatoes in other countries, although I am under the impression that they are rare outside of the USA, Canada, and China (PRC). If you know more about the status of GMO potatoes in […]
Recently, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about “landracing” potatoes and some of the other crops that I work with. I take this as a sign that Joseph Lofthouse‘s new book, Landrace Gardening, is selling well. I highly recommend it. If you have any interest in backyard vegetable breeding, click on that link and […]
There are some questions about potatoes that I get over and over again, like whether or not potato towers work, what the mysterious fruits on potato plants are, and whether or not greened potatoes are dangerous. This post is about one of those frequently asked questions that I hadn’t gotten to yet: why is my […]
It was tempting to make this post a joke and just leave it a blank page. That would, in fact, have communicated just about everything that it is useful to know about indeterminate potatoes for casual growers. Unfortunately, the proliferation of incorrect information about potato determinacy requires a little more work to correct. Ten years […]