There seems to be some others starting their own endeavors into True Potato Seed (TPS) and other similar plants typically grown from tubers from seed (yacon, oca, groundnut, potato onion etc). So I decided to start a thread documenting my own journey. Others are more than welcome to share their journey, thoughts and questions as well.
So last month, I bought some TPS and Oca seeds. I’ve wanted to try oca for awhile, but there isn’t alot of places to get the tubers and I have struggled heavily with getting potatoes from tubers. So I decided to bite the bullet and go for seed, all from Cultivariables. I got 6ish varieties of TPS (Skagit Valley Gold, Red-eyed Bull, Looking Lumpy, Portly Fingerling, Ayock, Twanoh y Azul, and a random mix of Diploids) and a random of Oca. They arrived 2 weeks ago, I planted Skagit, Twanoh y Azul, Looking Lumpy and Red-eyed Bull immediately and the rest sometime this week. Below are pictures of what I believe are sprouts of Skagit Valley Gold and Red-eyed Bull (the fuzzy stalk sprouts). Hopefully in a week or two I will have more progress to report, but I am very excited to do this.
Cultivariables is an interesting guy, good website and his observations. 
I got plans to breed my gigant and weiss truffle together to get some larger smooth tubers
Are those potatoes or something else?
ah i forgot to specify, theyre sunchokes
Thats cool! I haven’t gotten into sunchokes yet. I bought a tuber last year but it never sprouted. Got some more coming this year, “Supernova”. Tubers are supposed to stay close to the stolon, which is what I am looking for. None from seed though, at least not yet.
Skagit Valley Gold is a great variety with a few shortcomings. Fantastic flavor and texture but not super productive and doesn’t keep well. The short dormancy does let me get two harvests a year, provided we don’t get too much frost in December.
Hopefully you get some nice seedlings from SVG. My track record with potato seed has been less than stellar. Mostly I lack the space to grow out and evaluate more than a few plants, and more often than not, I end up with seedlings that taste good but have very poor tubering habits, e.g. obligate short-day tuberizers, super long stolons, tubers that sprout immediately upon reaching a decent size, etc.
I chose Skagit Valley Gold because it was the most normal looking ones he had available from seed. I like the lumpys and the tubular ones, but I wanted at least one regular looking potato as well.
Short day tuberization isn’t really an issue here (other than it causing potatoes to tuber too soon). We never get longer than 14 hour days and our fall and spring are both long and warm enough to grow potatoes (especially with a little frost protection). In the same vein, I don’t need them to keep very long, because hopefully I will be able to grow potatoes mostly all year (summer time might be rough).
The goal is to get one or two tasty, good looking seedlings from each variety, and propagate them from tubers after that. That would give me 6-12 varieties, and that would be more than enough. I am hoping I have the space for it, I hear potato plants can get pretty big from seed. And its also going to be a little bit of a crap shoot like most breeding projects. But I am still gonna try.
Where I am, SVG will sprout in March and mature in June. Those tubers will start growing again in September until frost kills the tops, usually in December. In good years, there will have been enough tuber development by then for a decent crop. Sounds like you have a good climate for double-cropping. Long dormancy can actually be problematic if you’re trying for a fall crop, since the tubers that matured in the summer may not sprout in time to develop a good canopy before frost.
What I have done in the past is to plant out a bunch of seedlings individually in 4-inch pots. They form a few tubers per plant, and I could then select for color, taste, shape, and dormancy without having to dedicate too much garden space.
I am surpised there was enough space in a 4-inch pot to make tubers. I might do something similar to to this, but in 1gal pots.
You don’t get many, but most plants will produce enough to cook a couple and save a few for replanting. I figured that any individual that didn’t produce a reasonable number of tubers within a 4-inch pot probably wasn’t going to be super productive in the field. Of course, this method doesn’t let you evaluate tuber size, but flavor and tuber shape were higher selection priorities for me when I did this.
Gallon pots or larger will work too. I only used 4-inch pots because you can fit more in a given space. The one time I tried with 3 gallon pots, half of them ended up with plants that filled the pots with stolons and produced very few tubers. I think I was working with crosses of diploid varieties then. More “domesticated” tetraploids are probably more consistent and less likely to produce plants with wild-type characteristics.
Starting in pots does add a half year at least before you can grow out plants to full production, but I have found that in my conditions, planting seedlings in the ground doesn’t guarantee a full-size plant in the first growing season either, and it’s easier to lose track of interesting individuals.
All my potato seedlings have at least 1 sprouted so far except the diploid mix. The oca has also pontentially sprouted, but as we have weedy oxalis that spread by seed as well, its hard to tell if it is oca yet. Pretty fast germination, even with how cool the weather has been, hopefully they can keep up the growth.
I will probably try more seeds next week to space them out a little. I would like to have them about where a potato plant from tuber would be at by the end of January so I can have a side by side growth comparison with my tubers that are coming in then.
I don’t think I remembered to post pictures of my yacon… the big maroon ones on the right are my seed grown volunteer.
It had the best spot apparently. A makeshift ‘pot’ of 2x4 wire fence, lined with cardboard filled with old potting soil and compost.
I didn’t realize the color change until I looked just now!
November 18th vs December 3rd.
I have a bunch of yacon photos I never got around to posting (besides the harvest).
This is the experimental/neglected yacon box.
This is the volunteer yacon. It was able to get tall due to being supported by wire cage. HUGE leaves. Resting bitch face. Also tired. Put flower heads aside in a bucket to see if I can get more seed. The flowers are, surprisingly, still alive in my garage.
A few photos of the yacon I had planted in a main raised bed. I thought they would do so much better than this.
I never weighed the whole harvest. I will weight what I have left when I process for syrup in the near future. Note from last year: peel the skins becase they left a resinous taste.
does anyone grow dahlia for eating? I was thinking of doing this but i know in my climate people need to dig up dahlias each winter- but would this stop them from expanding/ being a good food crop? Or is it like potatoes where you can just save some and some seeds etc.
I’m in Z8b and haven’t dug up my dahlias. I just make sure there is a thick layer of mulch on them.
Haven’t tried any yet, but I think I purchased some seed to grow this spring.
There’s a regenerative gardener/flower gardener in CO I follow who stopped digging up her thousands of dahlias and just heavily mulches and naturally insulates. I don’t grow them, but it can be done.
