If it has been a long time since high school biology and you are rusty on the concept of cytoplasm, you can be forgiven. It’s not something that most of us think about very often, but it is important to potato breeding, so let’s review. Cytoplasm is everything that is inside a cell but outside […]
In 2017, many areas of the US have experienced unusually wet and cool weather. As a consequence, a lot of people have reported seeing something unusual: potato berries. They look like small, usually green tomatoes growing on your potato plants. These are known variously as seed balls, potato apples, potato tomatoes, or simply as berries, […]
For many crops, you don’t have to search very far to find a nice summary chart of the major genes involved in economically important traits. This kind of information makes breeding decisions a lot easier. Knowledge of the genetics underlying traits allows the breeder to identify varieties that are homozygous for a particular trait and […]
This is one of those posts that is as much for my reference as anyone else’s. Surprisingly, it is hard to find a simple list of all the wild potato species and their known uses in potato breeding. This is likely to be a living post, which will be updated as I learn more about […]
Introduction How Seeds are Formed Domesticated and Wild Potatoes Ploidy Monoploid and Haploid Numbers Haploids Interactions of Ploidy in Crosses Unreduced (2n) Gametes Endosperm Ratio Endosperm Balance Number A Final Note on Probability Determining Ploidy Morphological Evalutation Guard Cell Counts Chromosome Counts This is probably not a finished work yet. I have been puttering away […]
Because we sell excess seed from my potato breeding projects, we get a lot of questions about what my goals are. Those goals are sometimes hard to articulate because I haven’t thought through them as clearly as I have done for the other plants that I work with. My work with potatoes goes back before […]
This was a pretty normal year on the coast of Washington. We had a cool winter, a cool spring, a cool summer, and so far, we’re having a cool fall. We’re close enough to the ocean that the temperature of the Pacific just off shore is a much better predictor of our temperatures than anything […]
I have been swapping potato seed with other growers for a while now and there is always a hunger for pictures and information about the seeds that I offer. I’m trying to get a little better at documenting the new varieties as they come out of the ground. Maybe this blog will help me to […]
As promised, here is the procedure that we use to extract potato seeds. There is no new information here; this is basically the same method recommended by Tom Wagner at his TaterMater forums, but condensed into step-by-step form. (If you are wondering why you should save your own potato seed, start here.) This is not […]
We’ve been harvesting potato berries from different varieties as they died down, but we did our biggest harvest yesterday and today. These are berries from plants grown from tubers. There will be a second harvest of berries from plants that were grown from seed this year in about a month. Berries from 30 different potato […]
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