Viewing post #471470 by stone

Horseshoe said:
As for taters, I've heard they lose their vitality several generations down the way but am not sure I understand why or even if that is true. After all, it is not like saving the very same potato year after year like we'd winter over certain plants year after year (foxglove comes to mind, which does tend to lose it's vigor for existence after a while.) Perhaps it is like inbreeding and the spuds tend to lose resistance to disease along with their loss of vigor (like the great potato famine.)

When we save taters, we're saving clones. No way to lose vigor unless they're being planted in the same soil year after year... without adding organic material to feed the soil...

When we're growing foxgloves, those biennials are sexually reproducing, and inbreeding is conceivable, if surprising... as the plant breeders produce stable colours by selecting against the variations in the same seeds year after year...

tveguy3 said:I can't for the life of me figure out why either, but I had come up a bit short on certified seed potatos a few years ago, so just finished the row with about 8 hills of the 2rd year potatos. They all got treated the same, watered the same, and when it came time to dig them, the certified were all nice big, and lots of them. The 2nd year potatoes were tiny little things. It doesn't make sence to me, but I never did that again. I thought it was the same genetic material, but maybe not.