True potato seed

[OlafsTwig]

At the beginning of lockdown, I plonked two Maris pipers in my garden as a thing to do with small children. They've both grown, and one of them has flowered and now has a berry.

Will harvesting the berry and growing the seed be fun for all or a total flop?

No idea, but I'd often wondered myself. I'd always thought that when the flowers come on the potato, you cut them off, so it puts more effort into the tubers. Might be completely wrong though? Have you dug up any of the potatoes to try yet?

aren't they rather poisonous?

@MarxandMarzipan

aren't they rather poisonous?

Yes! Not planning to eat it. Just to pick it, save the seed, and plant next year. Or not if that's doomed to failure.

And no, haven't tried any potatoes yet. My total beginners understanding of maincrop potatoes is that you wait for the foliage to die down.

I found this info:
www.gardeningknowhow.com/edible/vegetables/potato/true-potato-seed-growing.htm

Oooh. Do let me know how you get on. I did the same thing with some sprouting maris pipers in my kitchen cupboard. No idea how it will turn out.
Haven't got any flowers yet but lots of green foliage.

This is the most detailed info I've found, which makes it sound like a bit of a faff. I'm not bothered about yields or breeding the best new variety - just as long as there's some payoff in the form of a crop of some description!

I wouldn't expect you to get worthwhile tubers in the first year, I'd expect the first year that you'd get to marble sized tubers, but you might get a worthwhile crop in the second year.

The second thing is that when you grow from tubers ("seed potatoes") the tubers are part of the parent plant and therefore genetically identical. If you grow from seed, there is the opportunity for cross pollination with your neighbours' different varieties of potatoes, so what you grow may not be Maris Piper, it may be a hybrid - which could be better or worse than Maris Piper.

aren't they rather poisonous? Yes, just about all of the potato plant is poisonous apart form the tubers. So the tubers grown from seed won't be poisonous either.

Oh, that link does make it look a lot of faff! Can't be that bad - they manage OK in the wild.

It suggests that seeds over a year old are easier to germinate.

I'm not sure there are many other potatoes being grown nearby, so I suspect it's self-pollinated. I have the grand total of one berry, and not a massive amount of space to grow loads of plants, so I'm doubtful I'll get to a second year!

Marble sized would be just fine - especially if they end up having a bit of variety (educational opportunity here! Now we're all experts at home learning...)

I found a YouTube video about picking berries - apparently you wait until they pretty much fall off - so I'm going to do that and see how it goes. I'll update!

TPS update: DD shook the plant more vigorously that I have been doing, and two berries fell off! They're still pretty hard, so I'm going with closely related to tomatoes = stick a banana in a bag with them.