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Post by reed on Jul 21, 2016 11:55:48 GMT -5
Interesting work. My first try at seeds is not as promising. My commercial varieties have produced well and vines have died down. Only one plant bloomed at all but they were planted for production. My TPS of which I only have about a dozen have not bloomed except for one. Those flowers were pounded into the ground by a storm and ended up falling off without making any berries. I'm still waiting to see if the plant re-blooms or if any of the others do.
Clearly, got a lot of catch up to do in the field of potato seeds.
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Post by nathanp on Jul 21, 2016 22:39:53 GMT -5
I have planted TPS at various spacings and find that about 12" on center in each direction is about optimal. Much closer together and it becomes difficult to tell which tubers belong to which plants. Much further away and you have gaps between. I have had very healthy plants at spacing as close as 6-8" apart, in rows 12" apart, but most of the tubers tend to be smaller than if you provide more space. If you are only looking for small seed tubers to replant, then tighter together may be the way to go, as it gives you more tubers that are smaller, overall. Regarding the heat affecting berries, I find that to be the case. There are exceptions, and some genetic lines do perform better in hot soil. If you mulch the soil, that can somewhat mediate the affect. But once temps hit about 90F, berry production for me grinds to a halt. I currently have 120+ TPS plants, with berries forming on 3. And few flowers due to open, probably until the weather cools down some. This link details how the USDA grows plants for TPS production. TPS production in the greenhouse |
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Post by kevin8715 on Sept 22, 2016 0:46:29 GMT -5
I kind of researched this already but has anyone here have successfully grown out seed from a tetraploid and diploid cross? I imagine the way to go around this is to pollinate the diploid variety as they can't self pollinate unless you are dealing with 9H27-2. Currently, I put in an order for Sarpo Mira and two other potatoes from GRIN. I also have tps of Magic Dragon and Sarpo Mira. What I am aiming at is to possibly cross the diploid, Magic Dragon, with the tetraploid, Sarpo Mira, to hopefully stack the blight resistance. GRIN Description on 9H27-2: Donated by Dr. Kazuyoshi Hosaka, National Agricultural Research Center for Hokkaido Region Potato, Japan. 9H27-2 is an S7 homozygous clone generated by selfing 8H1-3 which has an S-locus inhibitor gene (Sli) which can inhibit gametophytic self-incompatibility in diploid potatoes and alter self-incompatible to self-compatible plants. Source: www.ars-grin.gov/nr6/n_clones.htmlI didn't order 9H27-2 since it goes against my plans of breeding an outcrossing potato pollination though I find the idea interesting of a self pollinating diploid, selfing can sometimes be useful when looking for some specific traits. billw Would gibberellin acid be necessary for the tetraploid x diploid seeds? I will try to pollinate as much flowers as I can, so that I can do a control group with the gibberellin acid. |
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Post by billw on Sept 22, 2016 1:16:17 GMT -5
Pollinate the tetraploid with the diploid. Diploids will sometimes produce unreduced gametes, which then gives you tetraploid progeny. Sometimes you get nothing, often you get a couple seeds, and occasionally, you get a lot of seeds. The inverse cross, dip x tetra, is typically much less successful and sometimes yields weird things like triploids and aneuploids.
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Post by reed on Sept 22, 2016 4:28:24 GMT -5
My TPS was a total flop. Only one plant bloomed but they were beaten into the ground by a storm and didn't set seeds. I dug them all up the other day and found five little taters. Four about the size of marbles and one a little larger. I'm going out today and sift the ground and see if maybe a few more are in there. There is no way I can keep these stored so I'm gonna go ahead and replant them. Maybe they will live and sprout next year. Got more seeds in backup so I'll try again next year.
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Post by nathanp on Sept 23, 2016 20:42:34 GMT -5
Reed, TPS tubers are so more variable than potatoes grown from tubers. You really don't have an idea of what you have until you grow it as a clone in the 2nd year.
With the drought I've had this year, I have very few TPS plants that produced sizeable tubers. I'll probably get some that bulk up some in the next few weeks until I get a frost, but so far I have many, many marbles. I will plan to grow out most of them next year with the exception of those that look diseased or the plants had low vigor.
Kevin, regarding crosses of tetra to diploid ... to add to what Bill said, the maternal plant has a lot more say in the ploidy of the offspring. So with a tetraploid mother, the offspring has a much higher chance of being tetraploid than the other way around.
I have quite a few triploid TPS plants this year, they are the F3 from a cross of diploid Magic Dragons as the pollen donor, to SISU (x ajanhuiri), which allegedly was diploid in all the literature, but turned out to be tetraploid when Bill counted guard cells. One of the two F1 plants I have is tetraploid, the other triploid. Offspring of the backcross of those two to each other, throws both triploid and tetraploid. And from triploid berries last year, I apparently got only triploid.
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andyb
gardener
Posts: 179
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Post by andyb on Sept 24, 2016 21:22:14 GMT -5
A couple of years ago I had some marble-sized potatoes from TPS that I overwintered by bundling up in brown paper and tossing in the crisper drawer of my fridge. It didn't take much space and they were rock-hard in the spring.
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Post by jondear on Sept 25, 2016 19:59:10 GMT -5
Pretty much all my potatoes were decimated by Colorado potato beetles this year... Currently, my potato patch is a mess with weeds in various stages of dying. It ought to be a fun harvest. I'm guessing I'll find a lot of volunteers where my tps plants were this year. Maybe a good disking will realign them in rows next spring. 😣
Maybe I ought to look into some King Harry's for next season. Not that trichome hairs will necessarily deter cpb, but it might help. I should also try a later planting date as well.
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Post by nathanp on Nov 29, 2016 23:01:22 GMT -5
You will find that to be largely dependent upon the parentage. Most commercial varieties in temperate regions have been bred to store well. In tropical areas this is not a desirable trait, so many potatoes (phureja diploids) or tuberosum andigena types often have shorter dormancy.
Any idea what the parents of yours were? As long as they survive into the spring long enough to plant them out, I don't typically mind if they don't store perfectly. And storing diploids with phureja genetics are challending. They often start resprouting before you harvest them.
This is one of the main reasons I track the pedigrees. I started out wanting to move towards the landrace type of breeding, and may still eventually, but find it useful to still track the parentage so I can sometimes better predict potential traits or try to make specific crosses that might prove interesting.
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Post by robertb on Dec 2, 2016 5:30:07 GMT -5
If the ones which don't store effectively select themselves out overwinter, then it shouldn't take you too many years to develop varieties which do store.
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Post by imgrimmer on Dec 2, 2016 10:21:23 GMT -5
One thing that is really concerning me is that tubers produced from plants started from TPS and second generation tubers are not keeping well. Many are sprouting in storage months ahead of typical commercial varieties. I am doing TPS potatoes only on a low scale beside other things but so far all stored well like they should. |
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Post by steev on Dec 2, 2016 12:20:01 GMT -5
Food for thought.
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Post by reed on Dec 2, 2016 13:17:17 GMT -5
I'm sure we never has TPS but going back a couple decades, or five, I just remember we grew potatoes, stored them in the cellar and next spring planted the ones that were still there. They were sometimes sprouted and shriveled but they grew. If mom or granny wanted potatoes before time to dig them all they would just say "onea you kids go dig me some potatoes".
Can you just simplify and let em settle into basically one diverse kind.? If you want early ones just "go dig you some potatoes" as needed. And while your out there get ya a chicken for supper.
I'm thinking if when I pull off actual potato seeds I might try to replicate better ones as clones and keep the seeds as emergency back up.
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Post by ferdzy on Dec 2, 2016 13:19:37 GMT -5
toomanyirons, we have taken to planting our potatoes in the fall. They don't all survive the winter in the ground, but most of them do and it solves the whole storage issue as well as saving us time in the spring. There are always enough volunteers to fill in the gaps (which is why we started doing this in the first place). I'm not further north than you (on a line, maybe?) but an awful lot of my fellow Canadians simply don't save potato seed from year to year but buy it new each spring. There is in general a less robust seed saving culture here than in the U.S., in part because of exactly that problem - and getting certain things to flower on time, or overwinter, or store. Easier to import seed from the U.S. where these things can be done much more easily. Nowadays, commercial suppliers of potatoes can keep their potatoes overwintering at exact temperatures/humidity/light levels and keep them well, so I think that is encouraging some local suppliers. Home growers still struggle, although of course some people manage it. After all, there's no reason you can't plant sprouted potatoes; it's just not ideal. Final comment, I don't think potatoes to be planted need to be kept out of the light the way eating potatoes do. They will shrivel up and die once planted and growing, so the fact that they are full of glycoalkaloids (sp?) doesn't matter. In the light they will form buds and short sprouts, but not the really long, hard to deal-with leggy ones.
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Post by Walk on Dec 2, 2016 13:53:22 GMT -5
If the ones which don't store effectively select themselves out overwinter, then it shouldn't take you too many years to develop varieties which do store. Valid point. Instead of me whining about it I should look at it as a necessary step in the development of my local strains.  Something confuses me, though. In my mind another consideration in the selection process will be to select out short season/fast growing strains for summer eating/new potatoes versus longer/full season storage strains for keeping as a winter food supply. If this makes sense and is a good strategy then how does a person store seed tubers for the short season strains when they would be sitting in storage longer because they mature earlier? What if my early sprouters are actually not early, they had simply matured sooner than the others and sat dormant in the ground for a while until they were finally harvested? What if those early sprouters in storage that I reject and toss out are actually the seed stock that I need for developing my short season strains? And what does any of this matter anyway if short season seed tubers are not going to keep in long term storage until planting time? This begs a more general question: How does anyone farther north than me with a very short growing season, who grows short season commercial potato varieties out of necessity in order to get a crop, keep their seed tubers through their long winters without those tubers sprouting well before planting time? The whole thing does not make any sense to me. Am I to understand that short season varieties have been selected and developed for fast growing/early production traits AND long term storage characteristics? This has not been my personal experience regarding trying to store seed tubers of short season commercial varieties. It has been my understanding that, generally speaking, such traits do not complement each other in the vegetable world. I am also questioning how I am storing tubers. What if my storage methods are to blame for the sprouting, not the tubers themselves? I have been wondering if there are different storage methods for seed tubers versus food tubers, I have been storing both practically adjacent to each other over the years. I have been spending a little time looking into this subject recently... We grow some varieties such as Blue Adirondack which don't keep very well but which we love to eat. All of the varieties that sprout early are eaten first. These are the earlier maturing ones for us so part of the poor storage may be that they're ready for digging long before cold weather sets in, The seed potatoes are stored the same as the eating stock. Whatever the reason for short storage, we manage to keep our seed potatoes going by bringing them out of the cellar as soon as they start to sprout (usually around the end of January or so) and putting them under a table in the kitchen where it's relatively cool and has indirect light. There they sit and "chit" until planting in early May. The sprouts stay short under these conditions and are ready to go as soon as they're in the ground. We chit all of our potatoes this way, even the better storage types, as this is another opportunity to cull any stock that doesn't look vigorous before planting. |
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