I’m guessing golden flesh with pink skin for your pretty flower.
This is interesting if you haven’t seed it
Yay! Even if you don’t get berries, you’ll get some tubers to replant probably.
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I planted out all of my baby potato plants weeks ago. The slugs have been dining on everything here, but I have at least one remaining. The rest… there’s no sign of them other than where I pulled back the mulch to dig them in. The slugs this year are decimating everything, which is great if I want to find all the plants that can withstand slug pressure. 
Just feelin’ bad for all the plants sacrificed to the slug gods.
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After reading all the different threads on TPS, of course now I can’t remember where I read what! But the general feelingni get is that for most the harvest is rather small in year one, and there were suggestions of growing seed to (small) tuber, and next year tuber to seed and food harvest.
Just thinking out loud and wondering if I could start some TSP now (mid/late summer) let it make mini tubers, store those and plant them out next Spring? The reasons behind this idea are that for one I have the space under the grow lamp right now, in the spring there are so many things I need to start, there is never enough space! And the second reason would be that I could already figure out if they have any dormancy to speak off, and see the color of the tubers…
am I going totally off the rails with this train of thought? Could it work? Would the mini tubers the seedlings grow if left too long in their small pots be viable to grow the following year, do you think? Or would I need to grow them someplace bigger until the tubers are a bit larger?
Certainly that works if you have enough time to grow. You just might not get the proper selection pressure, but you might get some. I haven’t got much experience on tps, but those that did not do that well as transplants last year and only produced little don’t seem that strong this year also. Sample size is quite small, but I do think you need to do some selection based on early growth. This year my tps are now just over 3 months old and I have seen for weeks that some just aren’t strong enough in these drought conditions. So you should see something to select against quite fast, but it might be different things or strength as you would get in spring. Maybe that’s not bad thing either.
Just yesterday, I saw on Facebook, someone asked about planting diploid tubers right now and @Cultivariable answered “I would expect most to have time if you think you can keep them frost free until at least the end of October.”
I’m not sure how that would compare to starting from seed and only needing micro-tubers to count as a success. But potatoes make a LOT of seed, so the cost of trying it out and failing is pretty small.
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Thanks so much for your answer! I appreciate the info, and I think I might give it a go and see how far I can get with it this season. And as you say, if it fails, potato seeds are a plenty!
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Yeah I am not even sure I want to have too much selection pressure at this point, i figure if this experiment succeeds then the pressure can be applied next spring!
Am I supposed to be watching for berries here ? Do they typically ripen red or colored? Is it common to no t get seed the first year?
Berries typically are on stems farther out from the stem, on clusters… those kind of look like buds on the stem but I haven’t seed anything like that. Flowers will be obvious. Often flowers just drop off though without forming berries. Here are some examples of berries and flowers.
(a couple of years ago)Despite these lovely blooms on the Purple Peruvians, all the flowers dropped off without a single berry).
Berries are usually just green and can ripen to pale/white in really ideal circumstances. Sometimes they are reddish like these
I suspect most people never get the chance to see a truly ripe potato berry, but here are some.
In most cases you have to harvest them green and allow them to ripen.
Often the plant is dying, potatoes need harvesting and the berries are still hard and green, it’s fine, just keep ripening them in a place they have oxygen and won’t get fermented or moldy (like leaves and soil) for as long as possible.
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Thanks. That was very helpful and reassuring.
Who has harvested potatoes from TPS? How did it go?
Today I visited a friend’s garden who took a mix of of my good tubers this spring. They have more berries than I do this year, so we’ll be digging up his whole patch, and saving berries from the best ones.
Here are some more example of actual ripe berries.
I promise those white ones are potato berries!
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Those are huge. Ones I have seen (previous years) are maybe tip of my thumb and I think are fully developed although not fully ripe as they usually don’t have the time for that here. Mostly they also drop before ripeness for some reason. I haven’t seen many or big ones this year either, but maybe there are some that are hiding in the bushes. I haven’t paid that much attention to them.
My seed potato project hasn’t been a complete failure.
The six tiny yellow potatos are what has become of my ‘sarpo surprise’ mix of resistant races seeds.
I hope to replant them next year. But how to keep these small fellows alive over the winter? Any tips? Should i freeze them? For a while, then put them under indoor lights? Would that help…
The purple potatos i got offered by chance on a seed fair. They don’t sprout until later in spring, and they’re not attacked by the potatos beetle like my normie potatos have been this year. And they flower with an extended stigma. But no berries!! Maybe they are non self fertile. I had hope if i would mix the sarpo surprise plants in next spring they might do make berries…
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No, they don’t take any direct frost. Can survive in the ground if they are below frost layer (irish potatoes). Didn’t have any trouble keeping them in the fridge apart from few that had damage. That’s why it’s good to have them loosely and check regularly or discard those with any damage. If they don’t keep in fridge temperatures then they probably aren’t that good to propagate.
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Out of 50 seeds I planted the survivors are in the right hand of the front bed. There have been lots of blossoms but no seed pods yet. What I would really like to point out is look at the difference between those and the russet/reds/yellow potato mix that I have been saving potatoes and growing out for the last 5 years.
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I’m processing potato berries. I am lucky to have given away so many tubers in the past and friends are still growing them, to supplement what my patch produced. Lucky because I get the feeling maybe not that many people got berries yet this year, need lotsa seeds…
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Mine produced no berries. Maybe next year they will.
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How about tubers?
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I imagine there are tubers. I have not harvested them yet because they are still so green and growing. One plant died at about 6 inches tall and in had 4 tubers bigger than the plant itself was.
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