Why Do Gardeners Prefer Seed Potatoes Over True Potato Seeds?

Before I found out you can buy potato seeds, I thought I knew why we grow potatoes from seed potatoes instead of from seed. But then I did some research and... it turns out I was wrong. It's much more complicated than that.

Let me know in the comments if you think I explained it well or if I left you stumped and annoyed.

#gardening #potato

[GameBuddies]

Sir. Your shirt is fabulous and I love it ❤ Also, thanks for the potato knowledge :)

[witchyluck]

I was today-years-old when I realized that ... I had never seen a potato seed. And I grew up on a farm. And am a huge plant nerd.😅

[firesoullv]

Very informative, thank you! I remember now asking my grandma as a kid: why don't we collect the potatoe seeds? I never really got this kind of answer that would satisfy my curiousity back then :D

[icedirt]

They have created polyploidy fish to protect native fish in cases of escaping farmed fish and to increase meat yields. They did this by pressurizing the eggs or something. Kinda like polyploidy potatoes but manual.

[MabusTiefsee]

Use cholchicine (easily got out of a flowerplant) and rub it on the potato while the stem is growing. It doubles the chromosomes. Making the plant fertile again

[heikek]

Great video, thank you! In my garden, I observed that many of the modern potatoe varieties don't even flower, while the older/heirloom varieties often produce plenty of flowers and fruit. Any idea, whether that's in indicator of polyploidy? Will anything that produces flowers also produce viable seeds? Or has flowering simply been bred out of the modern varieties to make the plants put all their energy into tubers? 🤔
Last summer was unusually wet here in central Europe and I had two potatoe varieties that coped remarkably well with the rain, so I planned to let them cross this year and experiment a bit with the offspring. Hope it works, but if it doesn't, you gave me the explanation!

[Gwydda]

A nice vid. But how on earth did you fail with potatoes? They grow even in really bad soil and completely neglected :D

[nicolasbertin]

This is a disappointing video because you're not talking about what many people are doing today : buying true potato seeds from professionals. The issue with seed potatoes is that you won't find many varieties. You may think it's very varied, but it's not. The amount of crazy colorful varieties they have in South America is amazing. And you can find those as TPS. The issue is that like you said the yield is poor. It's also more work. Ideally, you would only collect the harvest from the second year. But even in South America they don't grow from seed but from potatoes. It's just easier, and if you plant a bigger potato, you get a bigger harvest. Simple as that. But if a passionate gardener wants to grow the wrinkly rainbow colored potatoes from Peru or Bolivia he has no choice but to grow from true seed (so far).