Potato Ploidy

[ecophreek]

Would it be possible to list the ploidy on the new store for the potato lines you are selling?
If not, understandable, you already have a ton of work in front of you. But the reasoning is that if people maybe want to play at breeding it would be usefull to know A can cross with B but not to C due to ploidy reasons.

Bought Redder Blood and Squat Orange. Looking forward to see what grows.

PS: When you say orange flesh, just how orange is it?

Thanks Tom

[Tom Wagner]

Your order....I just checked......has been filled and is in an envelop, sealed and ready to go to the post office tomorrow...couldn't today ...a holiday and no post office open.

The Redder Blood is a tetraploid. Squat Orange is a diploid. The name implies at blunt round potato...flattened so that the bud end and the stem end are like a coin. The flesh color of the original clone was a yellow skinned tuber with a deep yellow flesh bordering on orange. When it was cooked, the flesh looked even more orange...like a sweet potato, pumpkin, or carrot. Orange flesh was the norm with both parents....Squat Blue and an F-2 of a half sib of my Skagit Valley Gold....pretty much my standard now in orange flesh.

Due to the fact that diploids are obligatory outcrossers...they cannot self themselves, there is a wide variety of potential male parents of that seed I am offering. I would guess that if the male pollen parent was not orange fleshed...then perhaps a large percent of those may be lighter in color.

I am nearly sold out of Squat Orange TPS. I will not have anymore of this seed since the tuber lines is gone from my collection of tuber increases. For that reason, I will be very interested in any hills of potatoes grown from

Squat Orange as my customers will have more seedlings than I would ever be able to do for myself.

Tom Wagner

[ecophreek]

Thanks for the quick reply Tom.

Looking forward to seeing what comes up.

[Tom Wagner]

This is one of those times I want to explain a few things because the number of sales of Squat Orange TPS far exceeded what I thought could happen.

A bit of history, partly as a place setter, since I may not get around to explaining the history again. Back in 1997, I received a series of tuber family crosses from Joe Pavek of Aberdeen, Idaho. He is retired now.


I often requested crosses each year from him, and he usually had tuber families that were not important like coveted russet families and would have the smallest tuber samples for me to salvage. I would request from a few thousand to over 10 thousand different tubers, representing 100 or more crosses. It was a great way to get diversity and I was always on the lookout for novel combinations.

I was, at that time, one of the very few people who were interested in helping develop diploid potatoes and find clonal material for further breeding.
I had been getting many clonal families with the prefix ADX. ADX = cross (diploid X diploid) made in Aberdeen, Idaho, and selected in Idaho, but also by me in California. One of these ADX lines became part of the Squat Orange.

The ADX9502 cross was made in Idaho during the 1995 year. A year later the hybrid seed was sown in August and the tuber family was dug December or January. I received a C size class of tubers, meaning it was the third largest tubers...one per hill/clone and those tubers could number from just a few to over 200, depending on the success of the cross. Since I was in California at the time, I probably planted those in late February or early March of 1997.

I don't have my 20 year-old computer hooked up at the moment but that is where I have the extensive pedigree of ADX9502 located. I did not number my selection with a -1 or -2 as the seedling hill I kept eventually was the only one I maintained.

I grew the ADX9502 for a few more years making crosses to it and especially my Tres Papas clone. Tres Papas was a complicated cross of a Papa Amarilla clone and a S. stenotomum clone from North Carolina and a S. phureja line from Sturgeon Bay, WI. The cross of ADX9502 x Tres Papas eventually led me to name an interesting clone..Squat Blue. This was a deep blue skinned tuber with yellow orange flesh. I brought that clone with me to Washington State in 2004, part of 14,000 lbs of tuber selections of mine grown at McDonald Island, California.

Squat Blue was crossed in 2004 or 2005 to a half sib of my Skagit Valley Gold to obtain the selection Squat Orange which was saved from a single hill seedling dug October 24, 2006. It produced berries for about four years until I lost the clone due to negligence. I have a cross of Squat Orange from 2008 seedling hills that reverted back to purple/blue skin, and for the life of me, I cannot remember the name of it.

If I get time I will come back and edit this post.

Tom Wagner