solanum stolons

friday i was rambling on about the similarities and dissimilarities between the potato plants downstairs that were grown from tubers and those grown from seed...same plant of different varieties they are closely related enough that the morphological differences should be fairly superficial and today i noticed another similarity...the first and third photos are plants that were grown from tubers and the second and forth photos are of the stolons they are producing...those stolons mark them out as perennials...they also mark them out as indeterminate varieties which will continue to produce tubers as long as the stolons are covered or "hilled "...the sort of potato you want to grow in potato towers because as you cover the stolons to produce tubers the plant will develop more stolons above the soil surface that can, in turn, be covered with soil to produce more spuds...determinate potatoes, like determinate tomatoes, are bred to set tuber only to a standard height...they don't continuously produce stolons and were developed so commercial operations would not have to continuously "hill" the crop to prevent tubers from being exposed to sunlight and "greening"...i will be covering those stolons with soil just to see what happens...and i have an explanation for why some people's potato towers fail...determinate varieties of potatoes.

uh...spring needs to get a move on

this is a ten spud sampling of the fifty odd tuber i have chitting away down in the plant room...that there are fifty that are ready to be planted NOW when there is still snow on the ground is disturbing enough ( beyond finding room for all of them )...but i have even more that are still sitting dormant as well as plants setting tubers as i type...i have gone form scouring the interweb for sources of organic seed potatoes to having something of a local abundance in two seasons...did i neglect to mention the four new varieties the potato introduction station is sending next month? or the mashua tubers that are coming?...i see cyclical planting and harvesting in the near future...i don't see any reason to scale back the winter seed potato production though...no such thing as too many spuds.

spuds from seeds and tubers...and a flower

top two potatoes from tubers. third photo potatoes from seed...morphologically similar and different at once...the plants from seed are far more vine-like while the leaves are dead ringers...last photo is the teosinte flower continuing emerging from its sheath...that still has the agriculturalist geeked.

grass flower

no doubt...that is a teosinte flower coming out of the sheath at the end of that spear...either i have my dates wrong or this plant is flowering a bit early...i have it as being planted 139 days ago, although it germinated a bit earlier than that in the brown paper towel in the baggie...i left all the seeds that germinated in the dark to develop a good root before i planted them...still that would add only a week or so and bring that number to 146 days...still nine days before the nominal 155 days to flowering...whether it will come close to looking like the ones from outside last autumn ( bottom photo ) is an undecided question...more as this develops...i, for one, am geeked.

peculiar behavior for an indoor plant

okay...perhaps more natural than peculiar...but unexpected all the same...the largest of the teosinte plants i started back on october thirteenth ( top photo ) has reached twenty-eight inches in height ( second photo ) a miniscule portion of the eight to ten feet an outdoor plant would reach in one hundred and thirty eight days...however, like a plant outdoors, this one has reached the point in its season where it would flower and that is exactly what it is doing...that structure in the third and fourth photos looks nothing like the new growth leaf in the fifth...i an in virgin territory here since i have never gotten a teosinte plant to get this far along indoors before...so...the next issue is photo period...outdoor teosinte does not begin to form ears until the days shorten in the autumn ( which is why it is always a race between ears and frost here ) so i need to engineer a way to shorten its exposure to light, mimicking autumn...this will be interesting...succeed or fail.

spudland

from plants nearing the end of their season to seedlings to those in robust middle age the plant room is chock full of spuds...there will be more harvests in the next few weeks...and the government potatoes are due sometime at the end of the month or early next...who doesn't love an organic tuber smothered in butter? well...if you don't i just leaves more for me.

something of a variety

the craigs snowwhite in the first photo has clearly found the end of its basement season so i dug it up to see if there was anything worth seeing...what i found was more proof...if needed..of the genetic diversity of spuds...three small tubers ( remember these aren't for eating...they're for planting..size is pretty much irrelevant and each of these will produce a plant later this year ) ( second photo )...two of them are scored with lines and i would say they had been "greening" if they had ever been exposed to direct rather than indirect sunlight...the third tuber ( bottom photo ) is clearly a true craigs snowwhite...so where did the other two get their genetics from? beats me...wish i knew...as it stand there are three more tubers in the spring planting stock to go with those that have wintered over from last autumn's harvest..so...something like fifty seed potatoes of varying sizes on hand so far and more in containers with some time to go yet...we may have small potatoes to plant this spring but they will be decidedly local in origin. ( with the exception of the tubers coming from the usda of course )