Potato Berries
Oh yeeeah… what the hell are those?
For anyone that’s grown potatoes before, you may have noticed small clusters of bizarre berries that grow on the tops of your potato plants and look rather similar to little green cherry tomatoes.
Surprise, surprise- potatoes and tomatoes are actually related, hence the similarity in appearance, but these little berries aren’t tasty or edible like tomato fruit. In fact, they contain high amounts of solanine and are poisonous. So don’t leave these lying around for your pet Lab to nose up.
While there are varying accounts out there, it appears that these fruit produce what is known as “true potato seeds.” Each fruit contains up to 300 true seeds, similar in appearance to tomato seeds. To harvest, you need to wait until the berry is ripe then toss it into a blender with some water and blast it to liberate the seeds. The seeds should float to the bottom. Continue to soak them in water, similar to the process for saving tomato seeds, and then dry on paper towels for next year.
When you plant these seeds, they form little mini tubers that develop into robust new potato plants.
Most farmers and gardeners just keep a small stash of extra potatoes to plant as seed for next year- I keep mine next to my other stash, which means I usually end up making them all into french fries and have to buy more seed potatoes again next year.
With true potato seeds however, you can tailor your crop by selecting for certain characteristics (so choose fruit from the best performing plants) and begin to control diseases like blight (tubers carry blight forward from one year to the next, so you can break this cycle). It also means you can eat your whole crop of potatoes each year and not have to buy seed potatoes ever again! Yay!
Yukon Gold potatoes tend to produce the most berries, I find, and have very high yields of potatoes each year.
1 Comment to Potato Berries
I’m starting to think I’m your biggest fan! That’s very interesting research on the spud berries - I’ve often wondered what the heck they were. I think I will try some as there seem to be quite a few out there this year. It will be an interesting experiment if nothing else!
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