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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
This is the first of a series of short videos that will document the process of eliminating viruses from the ‘Purple Star’ potato variety. Purple Star was selected by Nathan Pierce of the Kenosha Potato Project in 2016 and has since shown the usual signs of running out due to virus burden. In this video, […]
Periodically, I get lots of questions about true potato seeds as an insurance policy against some sort of failure of the agricultural or food delivery system. The reasoning is straightforward enough: potato tubers don’t keep indefinitely and they take up a lot of space. True potato seeds last much longer and require very little space. […]
There is a lot of information on this website about growing potatoes from true potato seed, but I often hear from people who are interested but who don’t have the time to read all of that material. If you have heard about TPS and are wondering if it is something that you would enjoy trying […]
Would taste just as sweet? Maybe not. But it probably would taste the same. There are about 30 blue fleshed heirloom potatoes that are common in North America and Europe, but it turns out that they are almost all synonymous. This is a big problem in potatoes and with heirloom vegetables in general. People forget […]