Growers’ Notes and Photos (USDA Zones 4-5 Experience)
Lyuda and ladies, tell me, how do you store potatoes grown from true seed? We want to save them for planting next spring. We grew some pretty decent tubers, some small and some bigger ones.
Mariya Suvorova wrote:
Lyuda and ladies, tell me, how do you store potatoes grown from true seed, we want to save them for planting next spring…
Masha, for the first 2-3 months I think you can just keep them in a cool root cellar, but make sure to really green them up well before that. And then wrap them in newspaper and put them in the fridge.
I just want to point out, nothing good will really come of this idea: you won’t get a huge harvest, you won’t get a stable new variety, and you won’t get renewed, disease-free tubers.
Aleksan9ra wrote:
…nothing good will really come of this idea: you won’t get a huge harvest, you won’t get a stable new variety, and you won’t get renewed, disease-free tubers.
Lyuda, my sister and I honestly just wanted to get our hands on these specific potato varieties, Synok and Chugunka.
Mariya Suvorova wrote:
Lyuda, my sister and I honestly just wanted to get our hands on these specific potato varieties, Synok and Chugunka.
Oh, that is just too cute, Masha! 🙏 🎩 👍
And here people are out there chasing after fancy cars… they understand nothing about life! 😁
Mariya Suvorova wrote:
Lyuda, my sister and I honestly just wanted to get our hands on these specific potato varieties, Synok and Chugunka.
Masha, good luck to you guys! Just keep in mind that even if potatoes from true seed do happen to repeat the variety traits, the genetics are still highly unstable. True potato seeds are really only interesting for professional breeders, and even then, mostly a thing of the past.
SvetaR wrote:
Oh, that is just too cute, Masha! 🙏 🎩 👍
And here people are out there chasing after fancy cars… they understand nothing about life! 😁
Svetik, whenever my husband starts grumbling that I buy all sorts of crap and that he’s sick of all this nonsense, having to drive to the shipping company again to pick up a package, etc., I just tell him that actually, I’d much rather be collecting diamonds and cars)))) Then he says sadly, “Alright, alright, go buy your seeds and seedlings.” )))
Mariya Suvorova wrote:
Lyuda and ladies, tell me, how do you store potatoes grown from true seed, we want to save them for planting next spring…
I don’t know why Lyuda thinks it’s so useless, she probably knows best, but I actually think the harvest is higher on the next planting. Though I only did it once, so I can’t state it as an absolute fact.
Tatunya wrote:
I don’t know why Lyuda thinks it’s so useless, she probably knows best, but I actually think the harvest is higher on the next planting. Though I only did it once, so I can’t state it as an absolute fact.
Tanya, I used to be obsessed with this myself for a while. I bought up every true potato seed packet I could find on the market. Grew the seedlings, then the mini-tubers, then the full potatoes.
Yes, it’s true, in the first year you can get a pretty good harvest of healthy tubers, but that’s where the story ends. By the third year, the harvest will be completely average, the tubers will vary in shape, you might get a lot of diseased ones, and they won’t even look like the original parent anymore. The genetics degrade very fast. So is the juice really worth the squeeze?
Tatunya wrote:
I don’t know why Lyuda thinks it’s so useless, she probably knows best, but I actually think the harvest is higher on the next planting. Though I only did it once…
Tanya, my sister and I are definitely going to plant these potatoes that grew from seed (if we manage to store them until planting time, of course). We’ll see what the result is)
Mariya Suvorova wrote:
Lyuda and ladies, tell me, how do you store potatoes grown from true seed, we want to save them for planting next spring…
Masha, you store the normal-sized ones just like you normally would. I kept the tiny, pea-sized ones inside a little box lined with toilet paper in the crisper drawer of my fridge. Periodically I aired them out just to get rid of any excess moisture.
But honestly, if you managed to grow plenty of normal-sized tubers, there’s no need to do the song and dance with the pea-sized ones. They are really hard to keep alive in storage. You can try keeping them in the root cellar, but you have to watch closely so the tiny tuber doesn’t dry out. But any mini-tuber that’s at least the size of a quail egg will store perfectly fine on its own using your usual method.
Full Summary: Storing and Growing from TPS
- 🥔 Storage Methods: To store first-year mini-tubers grown from seed, growers recommend “greening them up” first (exposing them to light so they build up protective solanine). Afterward, they can be kept in a cool root cellar for a few months, and then wrapped in newspaper and moved to a refrigerator to prevent premature sprouting before spring.
- 🧬 Genetic Stability: Growing potatoes from true seeds is highly unpredictable. Because potatoes are highly heterozygous, the resulting tubers may not perfectly match the parent plant.
- 📉 Degradation: While the first-year harvest from TPS mini-tubers can yield healthy, vigorous plants, veteran growers warn that the genetics degrade rapidly. By the third year, the potatoes often lose their uniformity, succumb to disease, and revert to average or poor yields.
In the US, when we say we are planting “seed potatoes,” we are almost always talking about planting physical tubers (clones). However, in this thread, the growers are experimenting with True Potato Seed (TPS)—the actual tiny botanical seeds that form inside the toxic green berries on potato foliage. Some gardeners try to grow from TPS because it temporarily cleans out the accumulated viral load that builds up in potato clones over the years. Also, the grower mentions “Synok” and “Chugunka”—these are highly sought-after, legendary old Russian potato varieties that are notoriously hard to find in tuber form, leading her to try and hunt them down via botanical seed!
