Oooh, I’ve heard wine cap mushroom is a wonderful all-around mushroom. Tasty and great for plant roots. I’ve been thinking I should introduce it into my garden. Where did you get yours from?
Well, I have just found these mushrooms in someone’s garden, took spoiled ones and innoculated wood chips on the paths with them (blended in a bucket of water). But you guys in the US have wonderful Paul Stamets and his company that offers a multitude of funghi spawns. It is called Funghi Perfecti or something similar. And his books describe all about growing various mushrooms.
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Oh, cool, that seems like a neat resource.
Of course, I like your method of getting a localized strain from a neighbor for free much better! 
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I have made a major error this year in my garden planning. To make room for new projects, expanding the size of the garden was essential. The error was not getting these new beds constructed during winter. The rain and the heat has slowed me down. This is going to cost me significantly. I haven’t been able to plant my okra or melon landrace yet.
The error was due to me not wanting to have bare soil longer than necessary. I also don’t trust store bought mulch, straw, etc.
The lesson moving forward for me is I would rather have bare soil for 1 month in the late winter and have every bed ready to plant vs not being ready and overwhelmed by bad weather events.
I may also start a compost pile of grass clippings. It’s the only abundant resource I have on my property. Then perhaps I could use this to cover any newly formed beds or those which I have terminated a cover crop but not yet have planted seed.
That’s a great lesson to learn from. I made much the same mistake last year. Thank you for sharing it!
My thinking going forward is that if I have bare soil, I can cover it with cardboard (and a few big rocks on top to keep it from blowing away). Then weed seeds won’t land there, perennial weeds will have trouble coming up, and I’ll have all the benefits of bare soil with none of the detriments of it in spring. I’m hoping that’ll work well!
Here’s an update on the Athena cantaloupe seeds in threw into a cat litter box. I thought this was 100% failure possibility, just doing for fun. However, now I wonder if I might actually get a cantaloupe out of this lol.
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I don’t either. That stuff is dangerous in my opinion. Grass clippings can be very useful and of course you can if you want too but I don’t think it’s really necessary to compost them. I just use them basically as mulch and they compost on their own. You can speed that up by scraping up a bit of soil and throwing it on top, it doesn’t take much.
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Thanks, I’ve been experimenting with some grass clippings as mulch. Pretty much from now on, if I am not pressed for time, I will be using my bagger on my lawn mower.
Field & Forest is another reliable source for stropharia.
Did you try using those potatoes as seed potatoes? I wonder if that might lead to something good? The feral one you mentioned might indicate not. But I’m curious if you tried using all that produced even small ones to continue efforts … if in the second year the potatoes were acceptable, you could continue that from clones year after year, and maybe even the seeds from the second year’s crop might do better, so you could maybe improve the landrace via seed gradually like that, whilst growing clones in parallel?
Also, did you try TPS from different sources? Perhaps some are better adapted to your conditions already?
All good points and suggestions but no, I did not use the little ones for seed potatoes nor try more seeds from different sources. A major issue for me with potatoes is that I don’t have a place to store them over winter so growing from clones is basically out. A second-year clone that produces well is no better in my view that any other commercially available clone and I don’t have time, space or interest in pursuing a local landrace of potatoes. I believe my climate is just too outside their comfort zone.
My discovery and work with sweet potatoes more than compensates for the loss of potatoes. In my opinion they are vastly superior in every way. They produce a harvestable crop and more seeds, from seeds. They store easily, at room temperature for a year or more. They come in a wide range of flavors and can be eaten in lots of different ways. While it is easy to keep any especially good specimens as clones, indefinitely, it isn’t absolutely necessary as with potatoes. As long as you keep the seeds you can easily just start over if for example you are hungry and have to eat all of the stored ones or if something else happens to them. If stored well the seeds stay good without refrigeration or freezing for at least a decade.
In the comparison between sweet potatoes and potatoes, it may be that exactly the opposite is true in other climates. I was very impressed with @julia.dakin 's potatoes. Potatoes may be a better choice for you in London as well. Sweet potatoes do not like cool, damp weather. The roots don’t size up good and the seeds rot in the capsules.
I adopted a rule several years ago that on top of growing reasonably well and producing a nice harvest it also has to produce seeds. It has to make those seeds in one season, none of this bi-annual, saving clones or any of that other stuff. Some may complain when something bolts to seed, I say the more the better.
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How cold does it get outside where you are? Would it be possible just to store them in the ground, either directly in the soil, or, in a container buried in the soil?
… unless after 3 years or so you end up with a landrace that is better adapted to your environment (or less susceptible to the diseases or changing conditions that might arrive in your area in the near future) than the potato clone varieties available to you! But sure, if you don’t have the time or interest to go that route, that is understandable. And you can still grow that new landrace from clones once its established!
Or you could tell nice stories to a local friend to inspire them to take on the project, and then get good new clones from them after a few years 
I’m going to make a guess here - if your climate is within the zone for already established clone populations, it should be possible to make new landraces starting from seed. Just might be some work involved. But the results could end up better than commercially available clones.
Also I don’t know what it is about your environment that makes things hard. But if it’s due to cold or lack of bright light, perhaps some TPS from Scandinavia could help? There are people there using TPS.
Again just guessing here but it might just be a case of working that way for a few years and then having the result you want. But yeah I also fully appreciate that you’re doing great with sweet potatoes and might have no need for potatoes. So, not trying to convince you otherwise. Just exploring the topic… 
This sounds like an excellent example of something we can all keep in mind:
Sometimes a failure is a sign that it’s time to try something new, and that new thing may turn out to be better than what you originally were hoping to gain.
My climate used to be in the zone to grow nice potatoes from clones and with extra effort still is. The extra effort being large amounts of mulch, regular irrigation, artificial shading or some combination.
It has never, in my memory been in the zone to produce TPS. Even years ago, when potatoes still bloomed here, I don’t recall seeing potato berries. Right now, I have a fifty-foot row of potatoes whose vines are starting to die down in the heat and sun, that’s fine as that is normal, just happening a bit earlier than it used to. I expect the potatoes themselves to be perhaps 3/4 the size they would have been 40 years ago. Actually, although quite dry it has been cooler here this year than the last several. With the watering I’ve done in past weeks I might have the best potato crop in a long time.
Only two of the plants this year bloomed, and those flowers have dropped off almost immediately. Again, years ago they might have all bloomed but still not produced berries. A long time ago when potatoes bloomed it was time to dig a few up to eat, often with some fresh peas and carrots. We called them new potatoes. Later when the vines had pretty much died down it was time to dig the main crop.
In the three years I tried TPS I produced a total of three seed berries and that was by employing the extra measures I mentioned above. It’s possible that those three berries might have been the start of locally adapted potatoes. To pursue that though I expect would have taken a great many years to accomplish and would have come at too big of an expense to my other crops. Not to mention that it’s folly in my opinion to attempt to landrace a crop that has already lost its ability to grow well in our increasingly hot and dry climate when there is no reason to believe it will not just continue to get hotter and dryer.
I think a potato landrace is better suited to a climate that doesn’t get so hot and dry. Or maybe one that gets even more so but stays above freezing in the winter and you could plant them in November or so.
That gave me a chuckle , it hits mid to low 90s F, often and can easily go past 100, commonly associated with no rain for multi-week periods. Even my sweet potatoes, those with dark purple leaves, wilt in the afternoon sun but they recover immediately when the sun drops behind the trees and don’t seem to be affected production wise.
Absolutely, sometimes a failure isn’t a failure at all, it’s discovery and I discovered that potatoes are a waste of time and effort for me. Fortunately, there are lots and lots of food crops in the world, we just need to find the ones that are reasonably happy in our own gardens from the start. Then we can select and improve them to be even better. I don’t have the time or inclination to mollycoddle malcontents.
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Ah, so hot! That makes sense. Here’s a quote from Cultivariable:
Climate Tolerance
Potato plants flower and set seed most readily in cool, humid conditions. This is a commonality of Andean crops, which originated in cool, tropical highlands. In potato, higher temperatures reduce or completely suppress flowering and pollen production. The viability of whatever pollen that is produced is also reduced at higher temperatures. Some varieties will set seed even in hot, dry conditions, but the widest range of varieties will flower and fruit in maritime climates.
It does go on to say:
In many climates, it will be much easier to start with TPS produced by someone growing in more favorable conditions. Once you have seedlings with a wide range of characteristics, you are likely to find a few that set seed in your climate more readily than the commodity varieties. You can then save seeds from those plants and you will be on your way to a better adapted potato for your location.
But sure, it sounds hard for where you are, and it sounds like you have no need for potatoes so yeah, makes sense.
You know the kicker there? I’m pretty sure Yacon also originated in the Andes but that I got this spring from Cultivariable is growing like mad and I haven’t even watered it much. I hope it blooms.
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I ended up on the same page as Reed with potatoes growing in the subtropics.
I had built up to growing a few hundred kilograms of potatoes of commercial clones (eg kipfler did well). The biggest problem is storage since it never gets really cold here. This means the main crop is grown in autumn/winter, but I also have to grow a follow up crop in spring otherwise it is impossible to store tubers through the hot/inhospitable summer on any scale (ie if I try to store the winter harvested tubers through spring and summer they are shrivelled to nothing by next autumn). Storage in the ground didnt work (we often get summer floods or droughts). One spring we had a phenomenal drought and I lost all my tuber stock.
I tried growing out diverse TPS, got good germination but nothing managed to size up in the ground despite repeated efforts.
Then I got some sweet potato seed from Reed and they produced impressive crops in a single season from seed. The thing I really love about sweet potato is it is vastly more scaleable than potato. A single mature plant can become several hundred easily struck stem cuttings, while a potato has about a x10 scale up factor (and you have to sacrifice tubers you could have eaten). If you can grow out TPS then I think that compensates for that structural limitation, but in my climate that doesnt seem to be possible.
I just have to figure out how to either improve my soil texture for more reliable sweet potato production at scale, or shift production to my creek flats where the soil is naturally silty, otherwise I get bad weevil pressure in the tubers during droughts when the soil cracks.
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I second that. My next door neighbors on both sides of me grew sweet potatoes last year. They spend almost no time outside. I didn’t even know one of those neighbors even had a garden. He pretty much must had neglected them. Both neighbors produced so much that they brought me overstock.
It was a reality check for me because I spend enormous amounts of time in the garden for way less reward. I began to realize at that point that I need to start growing sweet potatoes. They apparently love my climate.
I saved a few sweet potatoes and managed to get one of them to produce 6 slips. I planted those slips and keep cutting off additional slips. I now have about 15 sweet potato plants that originated from that single tuber that produced the original slips. This is the gift that keeps on giving! I plan to surprise both neighbors at harvest time with a payback.
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I agree. Also, sometimes our experience is not a good sample size to generalize about the thing as a whole. This is one of the reasons for this topic - to illustrate this point. For example, suppose I had never tasted cucumber. I am at the grocery store and I buy the first cucumber I see. When I take it home and bite into it, it tastes awful and I throw it away. I immediately think all cucumbers are nasty based off that one experience. I am sure this happens all the time. Fortunately, I’ve tasted amazing cucumbers in the past and know there is a difference. It’s not black and white.
What we see, what we experience, what we know is very, very limited a sample of all there is. I try to keep an open mind and experience as much as I can. We only live once!
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I have done just that. TPS last year and transplanted tiny potatoes that I brought in for the winter. I started those in 4" pots under lights because of our crazy weather. I also have volunteer potatoes from the unharvested micro potatoes. They are just starting to bloom here in Northern Nevada USA at 4,500 feet elevation. It got down to 33 degrees F last night and we are setting records for low daytime temps for this time of year. My regular potatoes that I also planted are starting to bloom as well. Curiously the taller potato plants didn’t have any frost damage but the shorter TPS ones have some damage but certainly not killing damage. I will be watching those blooms but not too many pollinators active right now. These temps are more typical of April here, not June.
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