Potato, Inka Gold

True potato seed information and growing instructions

Potato products and sizes

True potato seeds are classified as breeding seeds and germination is not guaranteed.

Phytosanitary information

TPS is offered infrequently. In vitro plantlets and tubers may be offered occasionally.

Inka Gold was bred by Carlos Quiros at UC Davis and released in 1994.  This is a potato of complex lineage, including both diploid and tetraploid parents.  It has very yellow flesh and yellow skin, sometimes mottled with purple.  Tubers have smooth, thin skin and do not need to be peeled.  Why isn’t this excellent potato more widely grown?  Probably because people shy away from smaller tubers and late maturities.

Culinary Traits

This is a great tasting potato, with no bitterness, but a rich flavor exclusively found in yellow flesh varieties.  The texture is floury, but reasonably all purpose.  The tubers cook quickly and will come apart if boiled too long.  I much prefer to roast this variety, whole or halved.

Agronomic Traits

This is a large, late variety that can grow very tall.  If you don’t want it to sprawl, you can give it some support to keep it off the ground.  This potato came out of a complex pedigree, going back to European tetraploids on one side and a phureja type diploid on the other and it seems to me that it might have some residual short day response.  It tends to produce much larger tubers on shorter stolons in the fall.  In the summer, stolons often exceed a foot in length.  Inka Gold showed little resistance to late blight here and didn’t even seem to have much of the structural resistance common to late varieties, where the growth of the plant outpaces the blight.  This variety flowers abundantly and sets seed easily.  I’m not sure if it is self compatible.

True Seed (TPS)

True seed of this variety was open pollinated.  It grew in a block with other yellow flesh tetraploid potatoes, although it was also hand pollinated with bulk pollen.  I expect that the majority of the progeny will be yellows with yellow or white flesh, but there could be some surprises as well.  This variety tends to produce some bicolor tubers when pollinated by blue or red varieties.