Another Morning

Different cat this morning, and different issue, but the same result.  I was up at 4am and decided that since I am planning on taking a weekend off of plants, that I should get on some more of the potting-up that I had to do, and I still had all of the maple sap from yesterday to cook down.

So as of this writing, 8 gallons of sap has been reduced to 3, and I have potted up Siberian Peppers, De Arbol Peppers, Ground Cherries, and potatoes I am growing from seed.

The term for growing potatoes is True Potato Seed, or TPS plants.  They are from a collection of potato berries I collected last fall during harvest time from a myriad of plants.  All of the potatoes you buy in a store, or sets you buy from a catalog, are clones of one plant.  When you grow them from the seeds from the berries (as opposed to growing them from cut up potatoes or rooting cuttings from sprouts) every single plant is different.

One of the great things about the internet is that it has connected me with thousands of people I would have never likely met at all in my regular life.  One of those people is Tom Wagner who is a potato breeder living in Seattle Washington.

After talking to him on the message boards for a few years I started to do what I could to promote him.  He had a small site he was selling boxes of seed potatoes, and packets of TPS.  He had given up on working for large corporations developing commercial potato and tomato varieties.  If you google Tom Wagner Potatoes and Tomatoes, there you will find a flood of information on everything he has contributed to the world.  But the world had not given a ton back to him at the time.  Another friend of mine, Rob Wagner (no relation) Went even farther, and set up a company specifically to help Tom W. sell what he had developed and was working on regarding new lines of potatoes and tomatoes.  Here is there site: http://newworldcrops.com/wp/

As a thank-you Tom W. sent me a box of seed potatoes to try here in Minnesota last year.  I then discovered that just because something does well in Seattle Washington, doesn’t mean that it will do well here.  There is a pest called the Colorado Potato Beetle which does not exist on the west coast, but is a real pain to deal with here in Minnesota.  They destroyed a good number of the plants later in the season, eating them down to skeleton plants devoid of any foliage, but others did fine and at the end of the season I found a few of the small berries that flowering potato plants can produce.  The seeds are much smaller than tomato seeds and the berries themselves are poisonous.  I made the mistake of forgetting the berries in a bowl I left on a shelf.  By the time I found them again in January the berries had shrunk down to the size, shape and consistency of small pebbles.  I had to soak them in water for a few days in order to get them soft enough to get any seeds out, and I sowed them thickly in a small flat.

Today I broke the dirt in the flat apart to disentangle the best of the plants and 32 are now in individual small pots.  Amazingly, some of the 2-4″ tall plants were already setting small potatoes, none larger than a pea.  I am not sure if that is a good or bad thing, but it will be interesting to see how they do this year.

So that is my morning, along with running out to buy coffee, getting the kids up and fed, making lunch for Nell, and getting them onto the bus (going out the door now) and I have to head to the office for the day.

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