potato seeds

[redbrick]

Last year my Yukon Golds threw a few seed balls. I jumped at the opportunuty, and saved the seeds. Then I promptly forgot about them. Now that I've remembered them again, I think I'll try starting some to see if I can get a worthwhile new line started. Any suggestions on starting them?

[Alan]

Hopefully Tom will se this and post about it, I would be interested in knowing too since I've never played with true potato seed.

[sandbar]

Is that what I found in my Yukon Gold patch? I couldn't figure out what they were (um, my tater patch got a little ... um ... weedy) I left them to compost ...

[redbrick]

Did they look like little green marbles, or baby green tomatoes? If they did, then, yep, that's probably what they were. And, hey, there's always next year!

[cff]

Interesting tator breeding link

www.aardappel.com/breeding/

[sandbar]

redbrick said:

Did they look like little green marbles, or baby green tomatoes? If they did, then, yep, that's probably what they were. And, hey, there's always next year!

That is exactly what they looked like! I remember thinking ... that's not a mater and I've never seed any weed pod like that, it looks like it came from the potatoes - no, that can't be it ...

OK, thanks to your post, I'll be smarter next year.

So, you gonna plant them and see what happens?

[sandbar]

Cool link, CFF.

Because I'm too lazy to dig out my Ashworth book, do taters readily cross-pollinate?

[cff]

One of the web sights I was reading suggested a few bee hives would help cross pollinate different verities with ease.

[canadamike]

Yes, and apparently, even if they self-pollinate, they have so many genes that they can re-combine them.

[tatermater]

I want to respond to this post without having to reinvent all points of relevance.

I am a moderator of two subjects over at TomatoVille.com where I lead discussion on CrossTalk (tomatoes) and Potatoes. I went to that site to pick out some comments I made about seed saving, Yukon Golds, etc., and I decided to just cherry pick some assorted comments I made without the linkage to the other readers questions and comments.

It may seem disjointed, but you may understand my work and interest without having to go to the other website.

Do you need to ferment the True Potato Seed? Jeff

Only if I don't get around to the berries while they are still fresh and somewhat firm.

I collect so many potato berries that, yes, some of them ferment or rot down before I get to them.

Fermentation is Mature's way of breaking down the gel surrounding the seed. I prefer to break down the gel with T.S.P., or Trisodium Phosphate. TSP is acleaning agent, stain remover and degreaser, commonly used to prepare surfaces for painting.


TSP is a highly basic compound and dissolves the gel quickly when the seed is dumped from a strainer into a small body of water with about 3% of TSP for a few minutes. Using gloves, a quick rub of the chemical on the seed within a strainer works magic cleaning the seed in preparation for a chlorine rince. Nature just doesn't clean like TSP.

When I get time, I will post some step by step methods of berry collecting, curing times, crushing the berries with a blender, floating off the pulp, separation of seed from the water, TSP and Chlorine treatments, and drying. If you wish, I could include some digital photos, too. (Note; Updated photos there now)



For some reason, direct seeding in the field never worked well for me. The potato seed is small and must be covered lightly and the wind will dry out the seedling bed too much. If one had almost daily or twice daily sprinkling of water, you may succeed.

I prefer the greenhouse method of seeding, transplanting once in the greenhouse to bury the cotyledons and first true leaves or so. Then the transplanting the field with further burying of the leaves. By several hilling ups, the original root zone is several inches below the surface as it would be with tuber planted potatoes. Obviously direct seeding has problematic disadvantages; seedlings too short and stocky for hilling up, weeding difficulties, too cool, or too hot of soil.

If I get time to fill in the detail, I will expand on this in my web site, still a work of progress.

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To my knowledge, getting seed from potatoes is rather rare.

Yes, that is generally true. However, since I've grown hundreds of thousands of different clones of potatoes, my selection criteria has put berry producers at the top of the must plant agains. I have no problem finding selfers in my breeding plots. Incompatibility, male sterile, and a whole host of other problems are associated with potato flowers.

Now years later, my potato plots are like flower gardens or berry farms.




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And if your potato is a hybrid (as most potato varieties out there are), then the seed will produce unpredictable results.

Unpredictable to the novice. I expect certain recombinations, colors, maturities, size, yield, etc., and hone in on the permutations. Since potatoes have an ontological history of being out breeders, this tends to be true. There are some notable exceptions to the rule, but often the exceptions are questionable since (Open pollinated) berries may not always be selfed. A field all planted to one variety, or carefully selfed lends credibility to stating a non-hybrid history.

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Each of those berries should have many seeds inside.

Not necessarily, it only takes a few pollen grains to set a fruit. Each pollen grain = one seed.

In the case of the photo I sent, the fruit may develop since it was pollinated, but that doesn't mean any seed will make since ploidy problems apply.

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Which is good because if I recall correctly, potato seeds don't germinate with any reliability.

In my many years of work with TPS (true potato seed) I have overcome this perception. More on that later.

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Tom Wagner is one of the few who is readily promoting the idea of starting potatoes from seed

Part of my talks at the SSE Convention this weekend will cover topics like this. (July 2007)

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and, in the furtherance of that, stabilizing hybrid potatoes out into open pollinated varieties. I wonder if certain varieties are more disposed to producing seed pods,

I have many lines that are 7 generations selfing and no problems normally associated with inbreeding.

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or if there is something we can do to encourage berries such as flicking blossoms.

It would work better to accumulate pollen and apply it manually. Some varieties have so little pollen that many flowers have to be tapped into receptacles and then this pollen applied to potato blossoms not yet opened. Once the flower has shed its own pollen, it may be too late for that flower. I pollinate potato flowers that are still in the bud stage. Potato stigmas like to be inundated with pollen, thus the Chicken-Fried-Steak cliche with the dusting of flour.

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Starting potatoes from seed would sure save on postage fees and eliminate storage problems.

I could write a hundred page dissertation on that topic



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Note that Yukon Gold is a hybrid, and since potatoes are diploid, you can get unbelievable variations in subsequent generations.

Most commercial varieties are hybrids, but Yukon Gold and most other commercial varieties are tetraploid, not diploid as you stated. Tetraploids are like two plants in one, and the variability in the selfed and/or hybridized seed is even more unbelievable.Diploids have 24 chromosomes, tetraploids have 48!

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This is why getting good TPS is so hard. It takes years of selections and crossing to get viable TPS of varieties worth growing year-to-year.

It is not as difficult as you may have read. If you want perfect potatoes, and super high yields, and high specific gravities, and a certain type of skin, and a specific pathogen resistance, and on and on....then the odds are against you. But if you are tolerant of a wider diversity of potatoes that don't have to fit a preconceived idea of commercial acceptance, then you have most of the BELL CURVE of OK potatoes. It's the template upon template upon template that eliminates some otherwise fine potatoes.

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Stable, good TPS is the holy grail and it's been tried with mixed success in S.E. Asia.

If you mean (stable, good TPS) that produces a very narrow type of potato where each seedling has to be a dead ringer for a Russet Burbank, then you may be right. But accepting a variety of russetting, with round, oval, oblong, and longs in the mix, then you may be much more obliging.

Most TPS seed for sale is either OP or hybrid lines that will throw 100% white skinned potatoes. There will be some yield differences, but the tubers can be marketed as a group.

TPS is a great way to get new varieties of disease free potatoes. If the first generation of tubers from a mixed sibling base is screened for type, saving only the 1%, 10%, 25%, or more of the bulk harvest, the selected prototypes can be replanted for a one time harvest. This way is best if you want every tuber to be yellow fleshed, or red skinned, or fingerling shaped, etc., with a wide diversity of traits in other ways not so visible.


With my fifty some years of selecting potatoes from true seed, I have some quite stable genetics within parental lines. I've made berry setting a priority, so that multigeneration progenies later, I have lines in all colors and classes that make for good potential hybrids.
My information and clonal potatoes are mostly in house, so you may not be able to google TPS and see my results. The industry in the USA is against TPS simply because they want a Katahdin, a Cascade, a Red LaSoda, a Yukon Gold, a Ranger Russet, a Banana Fingerling, a Caribe, and if it is not exactly that...they don't want it, and they think the market place won't want it either.

I am looking forward to the day when people will respect diversity rather than scorn it.

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I am very much looking forward to what else I may get besides the gold potatoes -- had no idea of the potential for such huge variability!

I have been testing Yukon Gold OP berries for 25 years or more ever since the experimental clone was first accessed by me. In controlled self pollinated berries, as opposed to OP berries, I get a rather predictable segregation of types each time I grow out seedlings. If you grow out seedlings yourself enjoy the following:
· whites with white flesh
· whites with light yellow flesh
· yellows with light yellow flesh
· yellows with medium yellow flesh
· yellows with deeper yellow flesh
· repeat of above but with either light pink eyes/red eye
· all of the above with templates of size, yield, shape, flavor, etc., differences.
Yukon Gold was selected from a cross between Norgleam (female) andW5279-4 (a yellow-fleshed diploid hybrid of Solanum phureja and haploid cv Katahdin). Yukon Gold is a tetraploid because of the unreduced gamete from it pollen parent.


It was tested under the pedigree G6666-4Y.

The male was a USW 1(Katahdin) x PI 195198.13 (phu) hybrid. The plant introduction was from Columbia but the line used in the breeding was seedling #13, note the .13 behind the accession number. This seedling had pink/red eyes and deep yellow flesh.

PI 195198

Solanum phureja subsp. phureja SOLANACEAE Donor identifier: CPC 979. England 1951
Collected in: Narino, Colombia

The Solanum phureja varieties,have distinct taste benefits, very full flavor and unusual textural qualities.

For cool photos of potatoes from Colombia check this out:
bp2.blogger.com/_VOyodbGaDqc/...o+colombia.jpg

Norgleam was a selfed (OP) of its parents: ND 457-1 x ND 457-1 1957



ND457-1 from North Dakota is a cross between SEBAGO x MINN. 92.36-5

Sebago is a cross of sibs: (CHIPPEWA x KATAHDIN)

Looking back at all the Katahdins in Yukon Gold, I determined that it is 5/8 Katahdin.

Its maternal grandparents are one and the same and ¾ Katahdin and its paternal grandmother is a dihaploid of Katahdin, so that makes that grandparent 100% Katahdin. Only the paternal grandfather is not related. The coefficient of inbreeding data is significant.

Nine steps of inbreeding Katahdin clones went into the Yukon Gold. Note the pedigree here:

www.plantbreeding.wur.nl/potatopedigree/pedigree_imagemap.php?id=7222&showjaar=0&depth=7
Or,,…

potatodbase.dpw.wau.nl/pedigr...ap.php?id=7222

Tom Wagner BTW has several generations of inbred Yukon Golds and hybrids to many other gold fleshed types.




As I said from the beginning, it may be disjointed, but I took a few pains to make it somewhat readable.

Tom

[Alan]

Tom, thanks so much for the great and informative post, that really cleared up a lot of the things I was wondering about.

Do you mind to post the pics of your cleaning and gathering of berries and seeds here so as to provide a visual aide to those of us wishing to do the same next year?

Also, I was wondering if you would be willing to post some pictures of both your tomato and your potato segragates, particularly those with outstanding color or shape characteristics, I would like to see some of your more modern work sometime, I am really excited for you to get tatermater seeds up and going again and I will be a definite repeat customer.

Thanks,
Alan

[redbrick]

Tom, thank you for that wealth of information, it'll be a tremendous help. If you don't mind, I'd like to print it out for future reference.

[Alan]

Hey Tom, I haven't seen you online for a day or two and was just wanting to bump this topic back to the top in case you hadn't seen my questions posted above. I am really interested in hearing description of some of the particularly recessive and strange traits you have done breeding work with in your tomatoes and potatoes, descriptions of oddities would be great and pictures are more than welcome if you have any.

[doccat5]

Thank you for providing that very diverse and interesting information. I had no idea and found it extremely interesting. Pictures would be wonderful, please.

[Alan]

Just bumping this up one time in case Tom is online anytime soon.