(farm) potato question

[closet squirrel]

A few of my potato plants have what appears to be small tomatos growing at the top of them. It is only a couple of them, but those have little bunches of small green "tomatoes" that are about the size of grapes. I cut one open and it looks like a tomato. What the heck?

 

[Dinghy]

I hope somebody else can answer you. I have never seen anything like that before. I wonder if a tomato and potato plant can cross and grow both???? I had potatoes that sprouted in the bag that had little taters clinging all over them, but I've never seen anything else growing on the plants!

 

[Tweakette]

Potato plants will flower so I suppose those are seed pods. They look like tomatos because potatos, tomatos, and peppers are all in the same plant family.

I've never seen potatos do this (mine flower but I've never seen them go to seed, or I've never noticed!) so I don't know why they do it or how it affects the tubers (if it does). I'd go out and google Usenet and see what you turn up.

Tweak

 

[summerthyme]

Yeah, they are seed pods. The seeds actually WILL germinate and grow- but
you never know what kind of potatoes you'll get out of them.

There has been quite a bit of work done in the past couple of decades in an attempt to produce "true type" potato seeds. The benefit of that would be avoiding "tuber borne" diseases like late blight, and also the relative cheapness of shipping seeds vs heavy tubers.

I think Johnny's Selected Seeds had potato seeds for sale at one point. The variety wasn't all that great- the potatoes it produced were medium sized at best. But what turned me off of the idea was they needed to be started inside like tomato plants (at least in our short season area) and transplanted into the garden. The idea of doing that for 1200 feet of potato row was intimidating!

Plant breeders use these seeds to grow plants and cross varieties to get new varieties- which are them perpetuated by planting the tubers, which produce the pure strain every time.

Summerthyme (use the seeds to get your kids interested in experimenting, you never know what you might get!)

 

[notimetospare]

I had this happen this year with my potatoes. I thought it was so cool that my potato plants were growing green tomatoes! I did find out that it's common, most people don't look close enough to notice the seed pods, but they definitely do look like baby tomatoes.

Vickie