Potato Seeds
Potato seeds are used to produce more potatoes. Typically potatoes are grown from tubers from a previous crop or bought from a store. These tubers will grow more efficiently if they have sprouts before planting them.
In preparation for planting them is adequate to get the seed potatoes at the end of January. If you do not have any potato seed from the previous harvest you will need to buy some good ones. One detail that is very important is to make sure the seeds you are buying are disease and pest free. You can buy them at the Internet or at a gardening store.
Once you have the seeds you can start the process to grow them.
The new potato plant will be born from the shoots of the tuber. Eventually the sprouts below the soil will produce more tubers.
Potatoes can also be grown from what is called “true potato seeds”
These seeds are not tubers but actual seeds. They can be found after the potato plant finish flowering. The small berries in the potato plant can contain hundreds of small seeds, as you can see below, they are similar to tomato seeds.
The “true seeds” have many advantages over the traditional potato tubers procedure. One of the main advantages is the ability to resist most diseases. The exception to this is the spindle tuber virus. Developing a new variety that can have a higher resistance can be done within a couple of seasons.
If you have a good climate around the year then you do not need to wait for a specific time to plant the seeds.
They also do not need big areas to plant them. You first plant them in a green house and later you can take the small tubers and re-plant them in the soil. The typical tubers are way more costly than the other seeds. Their small size makes them easier to transport and manage than the typical ones. They also have a higher chance of producing varieties that can survive harsh environments.
The typical potato tubers can suffer a lot if the storage area is not dry enough or the temperature is not appropriate, unlike the “true seeds”.
The “true seeds”, however, have one big disadvantage, the potatoes produced by this method are not uniform.
Each seed used can produce a potato of different size, shape and color. Interestingly each seed has a distinct genetic variation that basically makes all of them different from the original potato.
The food industry requires that all potatoes from one crop should be similar between them so using them for mass production is out of the question unless that problem can be solved.