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1. 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.

2. 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!

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

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