Potato Evaluation 2012

[NathanP]

Producing a new clone of potatoes is less tedious than doing so for tomatoes or any other vegetable where seed is involved. You plant the true seed the first year, harvest the seed potatoes at the end of the season, weed out undesirable clones then, and plant production potatoes the second year, enough for a small row anyway to get a good idea of what you have. It takes you seven generations to stabilize a new tomato variety through selection. Potatoes take one or two generations to do the selections.

Most new clones are not crap. They may not be as good as the commercial varieties as far as shape and production, but most give at least moderate yields and have average flavor. People here are not trying to reinvent the wheel by making a better white chipping or russet baking potato in their back yard. They are trying to develop something that they cannot get in the supermarket, and would at the very least have to pay a lot of money mail ordering seed tubers for unusual varieties. I have fifty row feet of a red skinned dark yellow fleshed variety growing that I developed from TPS two seasons ago. I cannot buy seed potatoes to substitute, AFAIK.

Agreed. If the only criteria is yield, then I can see what Durgan is saying, but that is not the only criteria to judge by, and probably is not even that high on the list for most people growing from TPS.