Take a quick look at this clever video (1:47) describing the advantages of growing potatoes from potato seed.
Advantages of Growing Potatoes From Seed
Using traditional cross-breeding techniques, a company in the Netherlands named Solynta (So-lynn’-ta) has developed a line of potatoes that reliably produce “true potato seed” (“TPS”). Most potato seeds have a lot of genetic diversity, which is not a bad thing for home gardeners. They produce potatoes with varying sizes and colors, so they’re unsuitable for commercial production.
Less than one ounce of their seed can be planted in place of 5,500 pounds of “seed tuber” potatoes that would otherwise need to be cut up into pieces and planted. The seeds are lightweight, compact, and will last in storage several years. I don’t know if they’ll survive freezing. But how hard could it be to protect a thimbleful of seeds that could plant a whole potato patch? The tubers, on the other hand, require careful storage (around 40° and moderate humidity) and are subject to rotting, insect infestations, and potato diseases, not to mention they’re a lot more bulky than seeds.
With potato varieties that set seed (most don’t), a person not only gets tubers to eat and propagate but seeds as well. You can grow more potatoes from either or both. The seeds at least give the prepper a much more reliable and protected source for potato planting in the spring, especially if you have had to bug out! Note that when potatoes are grown from tubers, their productivity slowly decreases from year to year to a baseline. But potatoes that are grown from seed are at their most productive level. That is a big advantage.
Solynta’s Strategy
Solynta’s strategy is to make potato seed much more available and require less reliance on storing whole potatoes overwinter. This might significantly reduce global hunger. In the long run, I suspect there will be issues with potato monoculture and with seed patenting. Their seeds will be hybrids and have all the limitations and issues of other hybrid garden plants.
The bad news is that their seeds aren’t yet available for sale in the United States, as far as I know. But they aren’t the only people producing potato seeds! If you look online, you will find numerous sources of TPS. Most of them have sold out for this year’s planting though.
A U.S. Potato Seed Supplier
The good news is that I just checked and a long-time plant breeder in Utah has a good supply of potato seed still available. I’ve purchased from him a couple of times and am impressed with his love for gardening, his generosity, and his work to supply his local food bank. Check out his website. His contact information is in the lower left hand corner of this page, over the picture you’ll find there. He has a lot more to offer than simply potato seeds!
Growing Potatoes from True Potato Seed
TPS are about the size of tomato seeds. They need to be babied as they germinate and sprout. Planting them directly in the garden is probably not a good idea. It could be done if you have really fine soil, a watering system that doesn’t disturb the soil, and you keep a really close eye on them so they don’t dry out or freeze. In my opinion, a better approach would be to use egg carton cups full of fine soil or buy/make peat pots to start the seeds indoors or in a greenhouse/cold frame. I would plant the seed about 6–8 weeks before the last frost and then transplant the seedlings into your garden.
SurvivalBlog has numerous articles on growing potatoes. So use the Search field and read up! When survival becomes all about calories, then the humble “earth apple” (“aardappel” or “pomme de terre”!) could be a tremendous asset for you and your family. Got seeds?
Trust God. Be Prepared. We can do both! – ShepherdFarmerGeek
Also, potatoes from seed do not carry over viroids that the tubers do. All commercial potatoes are made in a lab for the agribusinesses for this reason alone. So, If you are trying to grow your own potatoes from seed tubers you can only grow for about five seasons before the viroid load cuts off the plant from growing. If you want to learn more check out wikipedia for viroids and potato spindle tuber disease.
We’ve done well at our homestead in Ohio with potatoes over the last several years. We buy seed potato tuber from the Maine Potato Company. The last two years straight our crop has produced potato “berries” which bear the TPS. Infact, in 2015 we harvested nearly 1lb of berries. We haven’t been able to successfully extract viable seed from the berries. Do you have any advice? Also- once you transplant the seedlings, how/when do you harvest? I’ve read that the plants grown from TPS only produce seed tubers, not actual potato crop. Any insight would be appreciated!
Note to Harland:
Mash up the ripe berries, let them ferment for a while, then finally wash and spread them out to dry. The entire procedure is exactly like saving tomato seeds.
We planted some potato seed three years ago in an unheated greenhouse. We live at 9000 ft and grow nice potatoes from seed potatoes out in open ground. One year, we got a lot of rain and the plants put out their little fruit. We collected the fruit, processed it in a food processor, collected the seeds that floated to the top and dried them.
Each year, those seeds produced tiny little potato plants which we left in the soil. Now three years later, those tiny potato plants have grown a full fledged potato plant. I have not yet harvested the potatoes this year, but I did try to see if any “new potatoes” were available. I found two small, less than 1 inch potatoes near the surface.
The jury is still out as to whether potato seeds will produce full fledged potatoes within one growing season. Especially at our altitude.
I’m the grower in Utah that ShepherdFarmerGeek mentioned. I grow potatoes from pollinated seeds much like I grow tomatoes… I harvest seeds either in the blender, or by fermenting. I start seed in pots in the greenhouse no more than about 7 weeks ahead of planting-out. Yield the first year on good varieties might be around 1 pound of tubers per plant. Others are pikers. I select tubers from the best varieties for replanting. The second year they produce more abundantly, perhaps 2 to 4 pound per plant which is typical on my farm. By growing from seeds, and from tubers, I get the best of both worlds: The plants get localized to my garden as I save and replant seeds from year to year, and i get the higher productivity of growing from tubers. Seeds retain good germination rates for many years at dry room temperatures, and even longer in a freezer or refrigerator.
While the following may not add much to anyone’s gardening skills, I thought that a little history involving the potato and its impact on the world would be of interest to readers.
My first introduction to the survivalist culture/mentality was in a movie that I saw as a young Marine during “movie call” on the U.S.S. Vancouver somewhere between Vietnam and the Philippines in 1971.
The British movie, “No Blade of Grass,” was an adaptation of a novel by the same name by John Christopher. (The movie is one that I saw again maybe five years ago. Let’s just say that it did not hold up well. 🙂
The premise of the movie involved a virus breaking out around the world. It is attacking and killing the grass family. Not only is Bluegrass and fescue being slowly wiped out, but so is wheat, rice, barley, oats, rye, etc. The result is that a huge portion of humanity is facing extinction. People will need to get to safe places and plant other crops to survive (and acquire firearms by any means possible).
I will spare you the movie review, but one thing that I remember reading in the fairly entertaining novel was that an acre of ground that was planted in potatoes would produce five times the amount calories that would be produced by an acre of wheat, which is one reason that humanity was not going to be completely wiped out by the grass virus–starvation for huge portions of the population and intense social chaos for almost everyone? Yes, but not the extinction of humanity.
Young children who are well-fed are more likely to grow to maturity due to a more vigorous immune system. The introduction to Europe of potatoes from the New World spurred a huge population explosion between 1550 to 1750.
I have read that an Irish family with two acres on which to grow potatoes (and, presumably, some other vegetables) and with access to enough land to graze a cow, could maintain a healthy diet.