True Potato Seed

Yup, that’s right – potato seed. Have you ever had your potatoes flower and then grow little green balls that mature in the fall and hang on the plants past frost time? If you did, those are seed balls and contain little potato seeds within the fleshy pulp.

This is where we get all the new varieties of potatoes from. However, it is hard to tell how good these potatoes will be grown from seed because they are a natural hybrid, or cross between the two or three or more varieties of potatoes in the potato patch.

We extract the seeds from the seed balls similarly to how we do tomatillos, in water and through a fermentation technique. The seeds extracted are smaller than cherry tomato seeds in most cases, and are started indoors about the same time as tomato seeds. They are planted out after danger of frost, tended and hilled as any other potato and in the fall, the hill is dug and we take special note of disease resistance, flowering, vigorous, tuber growth, distribution and size. It is super fun as you never know what they will look like. You can have multicoloured skins, and flesh, and unique taste. Some will grow all the potatoes close to the stem so that is not a keeper. Some have small sized puddly potatoes and would also not be a keeper. Some have large tubers, well shaped and spread out within reason. We would plant those next year and see what the production is like the next year. It is a fun experiment.

This is where Deb’s Lollipop came from as a friend likes doing TPS (true potato seed) experiments also. This year we have some TPS available at our seed sales and online so if you feel like having a little fun, contact us and we’ll let you know the crosses we have available!