Inducing flowers in potato

[DarJones]

There is a thread on Alan's forum that may be of interest Tom.

alanbishop.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=tomatoes&action=display&thread=4708

As a side note, I've read about the effect of gibberelins on flowering and there are a few other phytochemicals that have an inordinate effect on flower formation. It might be nice to dig out some ways to induce flowering in potatoes.

Here is Joseph's post just in case it is of future interest.

In my mainstream potato patch this year only one plant produced seeds. Why only that one plant? The stem was broke just above soil level so that only about 1/4 of the diameter of the stem was still intact. I'm wondering if next year I aughta cut or break more stems to see if that really does encourage flowering.

There are plenty of fruits on the plants grown from botanical seeds. That's to be expected since I am selecting for potatoes that produce fruits.

DarJones

[lieven]

You-all hand-pollinating bunch, check out this hit& miss approach: www.growseed.org/potato.html. Well, that's just another way to be lucky at crossing potatoes

[Tom Wagner]

Thanks, guys, for alerting me to the links to tricks with inducing potatoes to bloom.


www.growseed.org/potato.html did not work for me so try this...http://www.growseed.org/potato
...dropping the .html worked for me. Someday, I should go through Robinson's publications and relate my own editorial comment.

I used to get worn out trying different methods to get potatoes to bloom. Outside of stepping on the vines, cutting them with knives, hog-tying the stems with baling wire, baling twine, soldering wire, shoestring, keeping the plants too dry or wet, putting tubers on a brick and pulling off any tubers.....I could go on.

The fellas at the potato breeding stations would share with me their methods of getting recalcitrant potatoes to bloom for the breeding blocks.
I wont go into to them here.

I used to work with Jim Weber over 40 years ago with the Frito-Lay company. Jim was the farm manager of the Wisconsin potato farm for the old Red Dot potato company. Jim would tell me about how his boss, F J Stevenson would make potato crosses. Dr. Stevenson did quite a study about 60 years ago and published his findings on flower production in the American Potato Journal. He retired in 1956 but almost immediately started with the Red Dot family (Frito bought out Red Dot) before I came to work with Frito in 1969. Anyway, Red Dot Foods, Inc. and its potato research program put Jim to work around 1956. Wayne W. (Jim) Weber was employed to conduct the research and later was put in charge of all farming operations. Jim related many stories about Dr. Stevenson going back to the days around 1935 when F J released Katahdin. The first Red Dot potato was Red Dot #1, eventually called Monona. Monona was pretty much a new Katahdin, a cross of a selfed Katahdin and a selfed seedling of Katahdin's reciprocal sister...Chippewa. Funny that USDA 40568 is Monona's maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather! That pretty much told me that a bit of inbreeding with berry producers and crossing again is a way to get lots of varieties with blooming production and helped me process the future work I have done to get flower/berry producers without injuring and/or dosing the potatoes with chemicals.

I was showing a couple of men today one of my plots of hybrid potatoes.
Case in point was about 140 clones of Skagit Valley Gold x Mix diploids. I was happy to tell them that not one of those hybrids could set their own seed, even though all had bloomed. A key moment was when I showed them berries of plant after plant with crosses of bulked pollen of each of those 140 different hybrids. That seed is recombinant Skagit Valley gold. Many of the vines had OP seed meaning that since the flowers are self incompatible they had to cross with sibs.

I figured that I had about 50,000 hybrid seed in all of the berries that produced. If I ever got my marketing skills together that plot of SVG hybrids would be worth upwards of $10,000......in seed and tuber sales.

In just a few more years....an unbroken link between myself , Jim Weber, and F J Stevenson will extend for over a hundred years.

Tom Wagner

[thefuture]

genius

[murgatroyd]

I read the thread in the link above which mentioned from a book that grafting potatoes on a tomato rootstock induced flowering. A few of the companion plant listings around the internet say tomato should not be companion planted with potato. From that bit of data I'm wondering if a potato plant could be induced to flower by planting it smack dab in the middle of a dense bunch of tomato plants so the roots are intermingled.

[Tom Wagner]

I grafted potato tops onto tomato root stalks back in the early 70's and again in the late 70's to get potato vines that would bloom and bloom. I have not attempted to do that since. I have varieties that do quite well in the blooming area, so I need not resort to that grafting activity.

I am not so sure that planting a potato amongst the tomatoes would help induce flowering in potatoes....I've had one of more of those crops growing as weeds to another so I have my doubts.

[murgatroyd]

Tom, how soon did the potato scions begin blooming?

[Tom Wagner]

The potato scions grew slow to start with as I did a side by side graft and cut the potato rootstalk off about the time I cut the tomato scion off or a bit later.

After a while the potato picked up steam but not until it dropped a few flowers. It grew rather lanky and had to be tied up. I got 8 ft tall plants eventually with lots of blooms but did not get berries to set until I made the crosses.

[murgatroyd]

I'm reading The Amateur Potato Breeder's Manual and in it the author says, "Note that a true seedling never yields as much as a potato plant grown from a seed tuber. Comparisons of tuber yield must consequently be made between seedlings and, at this breeding stage, they should not be made with commercial cultivars."

With the above in mind, if someone had a seedling that DID grow large numbers of tubers he or she would truly be on to something amazing.

[Tom Wagner]

www.sharebooks.ca/system/files/Potato-Breeders-Manual.pdf

On page 47 of 77 of this manual...it says...

Note that a true seedling never yields as much as a potato plant grown from a seed tuber[

/i]

I've actually had many seedlings that performed better as a seedling than when grown later from a tuber. My Diamond Toro yielded 11 lbs as a seedling hill and has never quite come back to yield that as a tuber plant.
I think that statement would hold true with most beginners and that is why one should plant the first year seedling tubers to get the first year tuber generation.

The key issue with seedling potatoes is to constantly hill them up and keep the plant extremely vegetative, delaying the tuberization and when the plant is quite large....the tuber bulking can be more effective.

Potatoes grown from physiological old seed tubers can start stolons from the sprout almost before the plant emerges...and that hurts yields.

Most potato breeding programs have sown true seed TPS in the late summer in the greenhouse and grow out the seedlings in small pots. These tubers are harvested in December or January. The biggest tuber from each pot of a family cross is bulked into the "A" bag. That goes to the primary evaluation field the following Spring. As a cooperator in the past, I would request the "B" or "C" bag; the one with the smaller tubers.

These tubers would be mini types...pea sized to near golf ball size. Planted out in the field in the research field at wider spacings than commercial potatoes, these hills would be laid out on the ground with a single row harvester and selected at about 10% of the total family. If a hill looked good...a few of the tubers would be put into a bag and a set number of hills would be planted the next year...many times only 4 hills from a single tuber cut into four pieces. The crop from second year tuber hill is considered the most comparable planting to compare to a commercial standard. Many seedlings families are rather large, an average being 150 tubers. At 10% selection rates, the first year hills may number about 15 and the next down to one or two.

I put a lot of emphasis on the seedling potato plant...I collect berries from crosses or OP's, I plant back many hills from that single hill so that it is not unusual for me to produce 100 lbs the very next year....so that by the third year I may have one ton or more that new variety. The fourth year can see an acre or more planted with 10 to 40 tons potential at the end of that year.