Just signed up to this forum because I've become really interested in growing potatoes from TPS - and especially also in making new crosses.
I'm really interested in the blue and the red potatoes which I wasn't really aware of until recently. One of the things I'd like to do is crossing Vitelotte noire (not Violetta), which is apparently a really old French variety and a bit of an outlier genetically compared to other common European varieties. It doesn't have blight resistance, so I'd like to cross it to one of the Sarpo varieties. Tuberisation seems to happen a bit late too (prob not fully day length neutral), and I found it a bit floury compared to my Anya potatoes, so maybe those are things that could be improved too.
One of the things I've been wondering about is how you ensure that parental potato plants are flowering at the same time so that you can cross them. Do you rely on potato plants of different varieties flowering at the same time, perhaps synchronised by weather conditions? Do you use successional planting, say plant some every week so that even if they take a different time to flower, there will still be overlap ? Is it possible to store pollen for some time?
I'm really interested in the blue and the red potatoes which I wasn't really aware of until recently. One of the things I'd like to do is crossing Vitelotte noire (not Violetta), which is apparently a really old French variety and a bit of an outlier genetically compared to other common European varieties. It doesn't have blight resistance, so I'd like to cross it to one of the Sarpo varieties. Tuberisation seems to happen a bit late too (prob not fully day length neutral), and I found it a bit floury compared to my Anya potatoes, so maybe those are things that could be improved too.
One of the things I've been wondering about is how you ensure that parental potato plants are flowering at the same time so that you can cross them. Do you rely on potato plants of different varieties flowering at the same time, perhaps synchronised by weather conditions? Do you use successional planting, say plant some every week so that even if they take a different time to flower, there will still be overlap ? Is it possible to store pollen for some time?
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