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Post by canadamike on Mar 3, 2011 23:53:24 GMT -5
Tom Wagner's diploid potatoes tend to be small--roughly golf-ball sized. In other words, the potatoes that are most sought after at market and fetch the highest prices. You're dang right about this Joseph, and even a few years ago I remember discussing it with Tom as this trend was building in Quebec, before anywhere else in the country in terms of general acceptance by the ''regular folks'' ( many had tried to push babies before all over the country) and it did not seem to be such a big thing in terms of continental trends....now you can't find a grocery store without loads of them in almost all colors. Real small babies, smaller than golf ball size, are fetching 5$ per pound in Montreal's JEAN TALON market, and the slightly bigger ones 2.50$. It is the second largest market in North America, I would bet it can be representative of any trend. Winter vegetables, like squashes, are now fetching higher prices, like 2.79$ a pound for butternuts and others. Rutabagas have gone from 25 cents or so a pound a few years ago to 69-89 cents.... As more importance is now given to more local sustainable foods and overall food prices are climbing, there will be opportunities for long keeping crops produced locally. I am getting back into this fruiting trees thing that got me started into gardening eons ago, and work with a great friend that owns a fruit tree nursery that looks a lot for old and forgotten often wild trees giving amazing crops, and a lot of them are giving, as an exemple, fruits that stay good for 6 or months more. Although I did not find these, I will secure these fruits for Eric in the canadian germplasm system. All those valuable (mostly) apples have done very well forever without any pesticide and can keep almost forever ( OK, I am pushing it a bit  ). He also has a pear almost indistinguishable from the Bartlett pear that does well in Lac St-Jean, the northernmost gardening area of Eastern North America ( zone 2b) , 3 zones up from Bartlett country. And even at 5 Bartlett is a gamble here in Canada, it is not the same 5 than in Indiana whatsoever.... Anyway, this maybe should be elsewhere on the forum, but I have a new job, pushing drugs for plants, like...seaweed based fertilizers ;D ;D I am meeting every week some of the biggest vegetable farmers in the country, a lot of them producing for the big food chains, exporters and many having an outlet in the famed JEAN TALON market. We are talking big volume here, acres by the thousands quite often. I can tell you one thing: we are getting business because the big seed corps are doing an amazingly poor job in the bio-diversity department. I can take ALL the ''specialty'' vegetables ( a term for bio-diversity, meaning difference ) offered by ALL of them big guys and it would only fill PART of my PERSONNAL garden. Sounds familiar to a lot of people here he!!! Anyway, given the incredible knowledge on cultivars of the well intentionned government specialists, oups, agronomists, most of them living god knows where and never having grown a radish despite all these years in great universities, I am very glad to annouce that next year, in the second largest market on this continent, a LOT of HOMEGROWN GOODNESS tried and true and exchanged and mailed with love veggies will end up in the mouth of montrealers and others. I am quietly building a network of big farmers helping in research and trials. I am having the time of my life, giving away seeds to people who will part from routine and grow their own for ''mass'' production and accept to do trials. A welcomed parting from waiting for big seed inc to come and rescue and sell the same boring stuff. Some organic, some not, but I am working on it, and god knows seaweed can help eliminate the need for many ''cides''. And, believe it or not, I have a few of the big guys getting into horsetail ,stinging nettle and alfalfa tea for fertilizing, fungus and insect fighting purposes.... One large potato producer is asking for genetics.... ;D We, this little family, represent way more than we think a very viable alternative. Nothing that did happen to me, ABSOLUTELY nothing would ever have happened without all the help and generosity of this family. Gosh....do I thank you all, you are such an inspiration, you have no way to know how deeply I feel being here was such a great thing. Truely life altering, in my case. I swear on my life and the ones of my loved ones I would built my new job and life out of all the inspiration I get here ( and with Tom and Tim and Alan...) and it seems to work darn well... Love you, friends Michel |
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Post by mnjrutherford on Mar 4, 2011 7:40:33 GMT -5
I FINALLY placed an order with Tom for TPS just yesterday. But, I got:
Smiley Blue
Diamond Toro
October Blood
Suytu Vilquina
But tell me know, as these grow, should I anticipate trying to save seed or should I try to save seed potatoes?
Also, are there any more photos of the Suytu Vilquina floating around?
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Mar 4, 2011 11:00:54 GMT -5
But tell me know, as these grow, should I anticipate trying to save seed or should I try to save seed potatoes? I planted about 20 varieties of TPS last summer. One plant produced an abundance of seeds. One plant produced some berries. A few plants produced one or two berries. Most plants didn't produce any berries. And there were a few berries on the ground that I don't know which plant they came from. So I saved the one plant as it's own variety of seeds, and saved all the rest of the seeds into a land-race. I saved tubers from any plant that grew well. I'll plant both tubers and seeds this spring. Some plants didn't produce tubers or seeds. And some did so poorly or were so diseased or pest eaten that I didn't save anything from them. |
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Post by mnjrutherford on Mar 5, 2011 9:03:19 GMT -5
Perfect information there Joseph. Thanks! As I was reading, however, it further occurred to me, can you save the berries like a tomato to ripen and bring the seeds to maturity if the fruit falls off?
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Mar 5, 2011 10:56:12 GMT -5
I can't tell if a potato berry is ripe or not ripe. They are hard green little lumps that just sit there: never smiling,  never frowning,  never changing c ol or don't quite know what's up with them.  I presume that if they are falling off the vine that the seeds are mature. But they store a long time so I'm usually not in any hurry to take the seeds out. I even found some about a week ago. They'd started to spoil, but the seeds looked fine. p.s. I just pulled out the seed packets from last year... That one plant produced about 5X more seed than the other 200 potato plants all put together. (And it could have been responsible for some of the berries that got lumped into the everything else seeds.) |
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Post by wildseed57 on Mar 5, 2011 13:43:35 GMT -5
Hi Mnjr., Michel and Joseph, I wasn't able to get any of Toms PTS this time around, but hoping for next year. I tried saving some of the berries from my potato patch last year but the one i saved got lost, I waited till the berries were very soft and wanted to drop off, by that time they had turned a little yellowish with dark areas that meant that they had started to rot.
Michel I wish I had a gallon of that seaweed stuff you sell, when I lived on the West Coast I would collect all the seaweed I could and put it in a barrel and wet it down and put a weight on top so that it would ferment down quickly, damn good stuff for the garden. I wonder if a person could get a no salt mineral block with sorghum, I'll have to do a search to see what I can find. Maybe a person could come up with his own no salt mineral mix? That I could spray the plants and soil with.
George W.
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Post by tatermater on Mar 6, 2011 4:13:37 GMT -5
Suytu Vilquina is not well documented on the web. I have been growing it primarily because it is a primitive cultivar collected about 6 years ago in Peru around the 7500 ft. elevation, and has tuber moth resistance.
I need to get a camera again so I can take pictures of it, but I will probably look at the next generation of it through the seedlings...TPS...along with everyone else.
I sent the Rutherford order off today. And whether or not someones keeps tubers or berries from it depends on their imagination about them. Are they interesting enough to save? Do they taste good? Did they produce berries?
And speaking of berries...they need about 6 weeks or a bit more to produce viable seed. I try to leave them on the mother plant as long as possible, but crosses are picked religiously at 6 to 8 weeks while they are still firm. Potato berries mature up the seed even after they are picked and I like to let them set in cool basement conditions until I extract seed from them two weeks to six months later. I tag my crosses and know when to pick them so I don't lose them in the field.
I hardly ever get around to extracting seed from all of my potato berries; too many to ever get around to. Some I let dry and extract years later.
Potatoes grown from true seed has lots of variables. Some just don't have good combining ability with themselves and/or crossed with other varieties. A few will have lots of must haves and many will have 'Who cares' types. The thing about keeping berries for extraction is that there is always those lucky accidents; crosses that never could be considered otherwise and serendipitously provide no small wonder in amazement.
Some potato varieties that set lots of berries may also be fantastic pollinating fools within the potato plot. I feel a sense of Nirvana within certain potato varieties when they are blooming...the sent is captivating to me and when I see the pollen shed I know that their pollen will be shared far and wide. A number of my varieties were like that...Kern Toro, Blue Blood Russet, Mt. St. Helens, Skagit Beets, John Tom Kaighin, Pokhipsie, and others. My energy level is always better when I am crossing with such great bloomers.
Got off track...but I am taking a break from filling envelopes with TPS.
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Post by Leenstar on Mar 6, 2011 8:08:49 GMT -5
Joseph-
when you have a disparity between seed production, like you mention with the one potato, do you do anything to rebalance its presentation in seed stock when you are working on landrace? if one selects for berry/seed production even indirectly I would think that the population would quickly skew to that variety and its progeny.
Tatermater-
By selecting towards berry production have you noticed any losses in terms of taste, or other desirable features in those lines of progeny?
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Post by mnjrutherford on Mar 6, 2011 8:14:05 GMT -5
Tom, I sure wish you could see the look on my kids faces just now as I showed them the photo you currently have on your website of the SV. I placed a second order for a pound of the seed potatoes as well.
I wish you well with the envelope filling! That is a TOUGH task!
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Post by tatermater on Mar 6, 2011 15:07:07 GMT -5
I understand the question well. I mean, does it make sense for carrots to go to seed and not produce a carrot root? Does it make sense for lettuce, cabbage, turnips, radishes, rhubarb, spinach, yams, etc., to go to seed before the crop is finished? With the case of spinach, radish, turnips, cabbage....we expect those to go to seed in the proper time and place and they have to otherwise where would we get the seed for the next generation? We think of those that 'bolt' as bad omens. Therefore, if a potato produces flowers, too many of 'em, or continues to bloom we get upset...huh? If potatoes actuually produce a berry or two...we panick! Right? If those same potatoes would produce twenty or more berries....ooohh, that has to be bad...right? What if it produces hundreds of berries? That must really be awful and wasteful.
We measure excellent potatoes as those which are early... hardly bloom and die down quickly. Potatoes that are that early cannot keep the foliage alive and green for the six to eight weeks to produce berries after blooming.
My take:
I try to restore the fertility in potatoes both as eliminating the male sterility in the anthers, and eliminate the early drop of buds at the abscission zone of the pedicel. (A pedicel is a stem that attaches single flowers to the main stem of the inflorescence). It does make the potato a bit later than some would like. But it also keeps the potato plant vibrant and alive...rooting down deep and collecting more the sun's rays for photosynthesis. The slightly later potato must be healthy, i.e. be virus resistant, tolerant to all kinds of things; insects, wind, drought, blight (early and late) in order to produce berries in profusion.
Once you have the vigor and berries down pat....you work on flavor, nutrition, and yield. I am a plant mechanic...I put things together that folks never dreamed about. Am I always successful? No, but a potato that does not bloom, or set berries is problematic to me...I can't save potatoes vegetatively forever; too many diseases that build up and I don't have the time or money to be professional in providing tissue cultured reproductions that the industry demands today.
Not wanting potato berries ? That is perfectly normal. But where do you get seeds from a seedless potato?
By working with seedy potatoes I build up plant health and then flavor, yield, and other attributes. By breeding the rare flower or pollen of super early potatoes with my later berry producers I can get combining ability for what I want and then you can select for all of that good stuff but select for a non berry producing clone within the millions of TPS progenies.
United States and Europe both started using the T-type cytoplasm, which was found in the majority of cultivated ssp. tuberosum accessions, suggesting the existence of a narrow cytoplasmic base in the European and American cultivated gene pool. Blame Early Rose...about 135 years ago, it burst wide open with many important potato varieties being created. But the male fertility was limited and a field full of one variety would not set berries since it needed a pollinator. Growers must have been ecstatic, as they didn't have to pull the flowers and berries off. Sigh!!!!
Tom Wagner
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Post by tatermater on Mar 6, 2011 15:14:55 GMT -5
SV? Skagit Valley Gold, Suytu Vilquina? I take it that you mean the near yellow/orange fleshed potato? I still look at my SVG with amazement myself.
Filling seed envelop work is eye straining...do a couple hundred of those in a day with all kinds of seeds, print labels, collate with orders, print packing slips, read special requests, label mailers, marked shipped on the order forms, take to the USPS for each to be weighed, measured for thickness and keep track of receipts....what... me worry?
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Mar 6, 2011 17:32:26 GMT -5
When you have a disparity between seed production, like you mention with the one potato, do you do anything to rebalance its presentation in seed stock when you are working on landrace? if one selects for berry/seed production even indirectly I would think that the population would quickly skew to that variety and its progeny. I am intentionally skewing my population in favor of varieties that produce abundant seeds in my garden with my unique growing conditions, weeding-habits, pests, soil, and environment. I'd be quite content if I could get entirely away from storing potato tubers for primary production of my main harvest. The potatoes that grow decently as seedlings and are not highly susceptible to wire worms and scabbing may get a second or third chance to produce berries in my garden as tubers, or to at least contribute some pollen to the patch. If a vegetatively propagated tuber gets infected with viruses, etc and the production decreases it's genetics will eventually drop out of the gene-pool if it doesn't produce viable berries or pollen. I'll keep a vegetative-only potato around for as long as it grows as well as or better than the new seedlings. This winter (for transplanting in the spring) I am likely to grow around 10 seedlings from the plant that produced lots of berries, and 10 seedlings from a prolific-fruiting plant that a friend sent, and 30 seedlings from my low-berry-producing land-race (just in case they picked up some fertility), and 50 seedlings from other people's seeds. I will also plant tubers from about 20 of last years seedlings, and about 10 lines of not-a-hint-of-berry-producing tubers from before that. Then I'll direct seed a few thousand true potato seeds directly into the field... I am primarily screening this population for potatoes that can produce a respectable crop in my garden when direct seeded, and also screening for resistance to my local pests and diseases. Something might catch my eye for other reasons like shape, color, vigor, fruit-set, etc... Varieties that produce abundant berries in my garden also tend to produce abundant tubers. If a plant thrives in my garden it thrives in more ways than one. (There are also plenty of plants that produce tubers abundantly without producing berries.) My ideal land-race of potatoes would be something that could be direct seeded into my garden in early spring and that would produce an abundant harvest of decent sized potatoes and produce enough berries to reseed the crop the following year. I'd even be tickled with a weedy landrace: Something that would produce an abundance of seeds that would survive in the ground overwinter and produce a nice harvest of tubers by fall. The next best landrace would be something that could be started from seeds in the greenhouse, and set out to produce a nice crop of tubers and berries by fall. (Zoluska is the closest I have found to meeting that criteria except that it is not fruitful. This spring I'll plant Zoluska tubers next to abundantly-fruiting varieties and see if anything comes of it.) |
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Post by mnjrutherford on Mar 7, 2011 5:28:11 GMT -5
I'm sorry Tom, when I said "SV" I meant Suytu Vilquina. The variety of shapes and colors amaze them. I've done the envelope thing several times with friends who are involved in non-profits. Adding seed packets to the mix... well, lets just say you have MORE than earned the price you are asking.
Now, about the potatoes and berries.... I like the analogy with cabbages, carrots, spinach, etc. Particularly carrots. The first seed I ever saved was from carrots and I did it by accident. I harvested my carrots and was shocked by one particularly huge tuber and I wondered just how big it would get so I replanted the whole thing someplace else and low and behold, the next year it was MUCH bigger AND it produced seed. That year I had some chard that I allowed to go into the next year with the same results. So, that is how I came to understand "biennial".
So, how would that work with potatoes? I would like to get berries and keep them for seed, but the ones I've seen fall off before they appear to be ripe. If I were to simply leave a few of the nicest tubers in the soil, would they, like the carrots, continue to grow and produce berries that would remain on the plant till ripened?
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Post by mnjrutherford on Mar 8, 2011 21:44:20 GMT -5
Tom, your seed came today! I'll try to get them into soil in the coming two days. Unless you give me a heads up to the contrary, I'll put 3 seed into a 2" pot filled with a 2:1 mix of vermiticulite:miracle gro potting soil with a touch of dish soap for wetting. Should I make a record of how many seed germinate? Is there any sort of record you would like me to keep and report that you would find useful?
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Post by tatermater on Mar 9, 2011 0:44:58 GMT -5
I always like to hear back how folks sow potato seed or tomato seed for that matter, and any information is good to read and share.
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).
never frowning, 
never changing color don't quite know what's up with them. 
I presume that if they are falling off the vine that the seeds are mature. But they store a long time so I'm usually not in any hurry to take the seeds out. I even found some about a week ago. They'd started to spoil, but the seeds looked fine.