We have a lot of potatoes left from our crop last year. They have been in the garage (unheated) and have went through all the cold/hot weather we have had. They are sprouting nicely so I mentioned to hubby that we should just use them for seed potatoes this year. He was not sure they would make potatoes but I see no reason why they would not do as well as the seed potatoes we buy. They sure have nicer eyes and beautiful sprouts ! He thought since they have been though all the weather changes they may not do well. Any opinions on this ? I say if they will sprout,, they will grow.
For sure, if they are sprouting they will grow and produce. We always use our left over potatoes for seed and we plant about 600 plants every year.
Go for it! I've even used some grocery potatoes that were sprouting, and got nice potatoes from them.
I read that seed potatoes should be certified and so forth to prevent diseases. Is that just a money making scam? I accidentally grew my store bought potatoes twice, but I was too afraid to eat them because of what I read. If it really is that safe and easy, I would go for it.
I live in potato country and can buy 50 pound bags of large nice potatoes 7 months of the year so I don't grow them. However we were just visiting with one of the farmers and learned that each year that you plant sets from the last years crop, over 3 to 4 years later your potatoes will get smaller. They replace their potatoes every 3 years with one year old seed grown potatoes. For a home grown potato, that wouldn't bother me until they became too small but then you could just start over again. P.S. I have also heard that the eyes that are sprouting and also green skin on the potato is poisonous. I haven't looked it up to be sure but that is what I heard.
Your potatoes will grow and adapt better each year to your surroundings and micro climate. Plant those that kept the best and look the best for sprouts. Do your own selective planting. You want to read a great book on seed/plant starts I highly recommend The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food by Jannise Ray. If you love a good read, gardening and save a few of your favorite seeds you can not miss this book. It is a good share of what traditionally been best practice in gardening for millenea up until the 1950s. Chemicals were not necessary in the past. Disease can happen to certified seed just as easily if not more so than plants and seeds saved for your microclimate and needs.
Only thing I know they are treated with is an anti-fungal. Yes , in my opinion it is sort of a scam but more realistically its a sales tactic. If you ate the potatoes you bought in the store,,why would you think the potatoes that grew from it would be bad? You ate the ones that are sprayed with who-knows-what, then are processed with machinery that is not regularly cleaned, and they are handled by workers who sort,pack and ship them, And I know people in grocery stores don`t wear surgical gloves to put them on the shelves, and then there are the shoppers who handle them. When you stop and think about it,, those potatoes you grew do not sound so bad,,do they? You can even eat seed potatoes after cutting the eyes off if they are big enough. All seed potatoes are,, are the smaller ones that do not grade big enough to sell at top price so they are sold as seed potatoes.
That makes absolutely no sense at all. You are saying that commercial potato growers buy seed potatoes from other commercial potato growers? The logical thing, if that were true, would be for the growers to have an exchange program and I have never heard of that. It just makes no logical sense that saving your own seed potatoes over that period would result in smaller potatoes when that has nothing to do with potato size. Or at least nothing I can think of. Green skin is caused by exposure to sunlight over a period of time. But to have any ill effects if you ate the green part you would have to eat about 5lbs at once. Just peel the green away like the rest of us do. The entire potato plant is toxic as a member of the nightshade family. Same with eggplant and a few others. Jewell is right according to my thinking.
I'm sorry my post was so offinsive. I was quoting what I was told by a man I thought would know what he was talking about. Also I said the green skin was what was poisonous not the entire potato. I also just trim it off.
What the farmer might have been talking about was improper selection or lack of introducing new seed potatoes with the old. Kind of like inbreeding in livestock. Plants people traditionally shared some of their best with friends and neighbors so that both can inter plant the best seeds of a variety. This helps provide the plants vigor. Big seed companies have done a lot to discourage commercial farm seed saving all related to chemical farming. This said I was very sad when I lost my scarlet runner beans because of an unnaturally wet fall and my poor drying process. The replaced bought seeds are a project in the making as I save seeds and try to get back to the previous quality I had. Never had to trade for increasing quality, just had to be selective.
Oh No ! Not offensive at all ! Just that what they told you made no sense to me. But I hear many things that make no scientific or logical sense to me. And the reason I added that about the green skin is because a lot of people throw the entire potato away when the hear the word "poisonous" . I realize that most of the members here know about this and do the same but in case there are new members or guests,, didn`t want to scare them away from potatoes. Have you ever googled "poison potatoes" and seen all the entries.
I'll have to ask the farmer to clarify what he said. The whole conversation started because I asked him why, when I bought such large crisp potatoes from him or the other local growers, the grocery stores potatoes are so small. He went into great detail about the differences of soil, irrigation, fertilizer,...much more than I expected! He did eventually answer my original question...you can cook one or several smaller potatoes when needed but only cooking part of a large potato doesn't work well! The potatoes we buy average 8 to 12 ounces each.
The previous tenant of my new allotment has left about five boxes of potatoes in the shed and quite a few looked pretty ok so I was debating whether to just use them to grow a crop from. I'll take them out of the shed tomorrow morning and discard any that look rotten and see what I'm left with I'll have to take some photos as I have absolutely no idea what variety they are.
You are lucky he gave you a start of them whatever variety they are. Mine are sprouting but as long as they are firm I still use them when needed. I dumped a few of the small ones after a storm blew rain into the garage and filled the container they were in with water. The garage has a small area of dirt so I put them there to dry and promptly forgot about them. Next time I thought to look they were over a foot tall and still growing.
