On Facebook on the pages of the Kenosha Potato Project a very interesting discussion started on 29.5. at 13.22 by Sam Jones. They are talking about suspended tuber growing. The tuber starts being grown like normal and produces roots and shoots. Then the tuber is unearthed. Roots are growing in growth medium below the tuber, the tuber is open to the sun, any stolons (that would produce potato tubers) are removed. The plant has no choice but put all energy into top growth and because it cannot reproduce by cloning itself, it is thought that this will stimulate flower formation. All plants want to reproduce and shy flowering potatoes can be made to flower this way.
This is the theory anyway and it will be interesting to see how successful this is. Maybe it has been done with good success before (does anyboy know?).
Unfortunately this does nothing to explain why my Picasso potato produced berries (as I did get tubers too), but it is a fascinating method and hopefully will be very successful.
The other way of encouraging flower and tps production as has been mentioned by a member on here before, is grafting potato plants onto tomato rootstock. In the case above on fb, the author attempted to graft, but his grafts had not been very successful.
It would be fabulous to get more potatoes to reproduce sexually. Ultimately it would also be cheaper to breed new and similar varieties from tps rather than in vitro storage and virus cleaning for old varieties that are heavily virus loaded.
This is the theory anyway and it will be interesting to see how successful this is. Maybe it has been done with good success before (does anyboy know?).
Unfortunately this does nothing to explain why my Picasso potato produced berries (as I did get tubers too), but it is a fascinating method and hopefully will be very successful.
The other way of encouraging flower and tps production as has been mentioned by a member on here before, is grafting potato plants onto tomato rootstock. In the case above on fb, the author attempted to graft, but his grafts had not been very successful.
It would be fabulous to get more potatoes to reproduce sexually. Ultimately it would also be cheaper to breed new and similar varieties from tps rather than in vitro storage and virus cleaning for old varieties that are heavily virus loaded.
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