Tag: breeding

Here’s something I haven’t seen before in my, uh, six years of growing potatoes: green, tomato-like, walnut-sized potato fruit. Bob hadn’t seen ’em either, in 40 plus years of farming. I hit the web for education.

These are genuine fruit (also called berries), but not that common. Usually, potato flowers just drop off. Pollination can be an issue, but even when pollinated, little details of the season’s growing conditions can make the the difference. When fruit do form, they’re more likely found on certain varieties, like Yukon Gold. This year, there were fruit on just about every Chieftain plant, here and there on the Kennebec, and none that I noticed on the Yukon Gold. Since they suddenly appeared this year on two varieties I regularly grow, I’d guess it was about the weather!

Each fruit contains 300-500 seeds that don’t come true: planting them doesn’t result in the same potatoes as the parent plant or each other, there’s lots of genetic variation, each seed will produce a genetically different plant! Potato breeders plant out thousands of seeds, check out the results, then keep replanting the most desirable potatoes for many years or generations to get new commercial varieties—this is the traditional way new potatoes are bred.

Meanwhile, it takes only two seasons and one generation to breed a new potato, so for the small farm or home garden, as opposed to the big potato breeder, this seems worth a try. At least as an experiment. Harvest seed one season—you can hand-pollinate to cross two varieties—plant out the next and select the best-looking plants. The tubers (potatoes) from each individual plant are ready to go: planting out the tubers will produce genetically identical plants.

But there’s a kinda big BUT: even though a potato grown from a tuber is genetically the same, you can’t be sure how its genetic makeup will react to different growing conditions. For example, it may be the perfect potato after a wet summer, and quite different after a dry one. (That’s why professional breeders check over several generations, and now there’s also high tech genetic analysis, to make sure it will be the same potato in the full range of growing conditions.) Still, at the very least, fun to see what happens!

And, the fruit are poisonous, rich in solanine, not for eating. Potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and tobacco are all members of the “deadly nightshade” family, all prone to having toxic parts (potato fruit are somewhat similar to little, hard green tomatoes). Interesting!

Since this is such a popular post, being dug up over and over via Google, I’ve started to update the article as I discover more. I’m not marking the changes. This is unusual. In general, I don’t edit old blog posts, and clearly mark the updates when I do!

There was action in the barn in the wee hours today. A couple of the cows gave birth. Here’s the first new one, around five minutes after his 4 am delivery into the cold barn.

This is the second time I’ve watched the whole thing unfold. The first was maybe a year ago. In both cases, human intervention was required, which consisted of Bob with a length of chain wrapped around a pair of calf’s feet, pulling.

Last time, he explained it was a dry birth, where the embryonic sac breaks too soon, the head dries out, and, less lubricated, it sticks on the way out. A little feet-planted-firmly tug-o-war type pulling and…a new cow!

This time was a little more complicated, a breech birth, with the calf turned right around so its back end was aiming out instead of the head. Particularly with first-time births, the mothers aren’t relaxed enough to let the bigger back end out first.

To help things along, the stainless steel calving chain was wrapped around the hind legs and attached to a cable with a ratchet, in turn attached to a steel fence post set in concrete.

The long-handled ratchet allows the cable to be pulled with more force than a person alone could manage, as long as the cow stays put and sets herself against the pull (which she seems to do, since I guess she too wants the baby out!).

After some minutes of pulling, out popped the calf. It’s a boy!

There’s lots of bloody fluid and trailing bits, and the calf lies there at first like a limp, wet, bloody corpse. But the mother is right on it, licking away, and within minutes its head is up and peering around, and if all’s well, it’ll awkwardly stagger to its feet in under half an hour. Pretty cool!

The second mother gave birth around four hours later. The first time watching all this was interesting, a little sensational with all the bloody fluid. The second time, it was simply satisfying, another really basic part of life that most of us in the modern world just plain miss (we eat meat and drink milk, don’t we…well, a lot us do)?

I’m not sure about the breeding timing or anything like that, like, Why calves now? With Bob’s cows, I’m an observer, sometime consumer, occasional chaser.

Here’s the second calf, three hours after an 8am arrival, up and tottering around! Sturdy!! It’s fascinating to watch them rapidly get used to their legs, steadier by the hour.

Potato fruit

New cows!