Most people are familiar with potatoes as the starchy tubers found underground, a staple food in many cultures. However, the potato plant is a complex botanical entity, and the part we commonly consume is not its true reproductive structure. The potato’s life cycle involves actual seeds, which many might never encounter.
The Potato’s True Seeds
Potatoes produce true seeds, though not within the underground tubers harvested for food. These seeds develop inside a fruit that forms after the potato plant flowers.
Potato plants produce blossoms that vary in color, from white or pink to blue or purple, often with a yellow center. These flowers are insect-pollinated. Following successful pollination, small, green, berry-like fruits develop on the plant. These fruits, often resembling miniature cherry tomatoes, house the true potato seeds. Each fruit can contain a significant number of very small seeds, sometimes around 300.
The Potato Fruit and Its Contents
The potato fruit appears as a small, round or oblong green berry, similar to an unripe cherry tomato. These fruits develop above ground.
Unlike tomatoes, potato fruits are not safe for human consumption. They contain a toxic glycoalkaloid called solanine, a natural plant defense. This compound is also found in various parts of the potato plant, including leaves, stems, and sprouts. Ingesting these fruits can lead to symptoms like headache, abdominal pain, and diarrhea. Due to their toxicity, these fruits are often left to fall off naturally or are removed by commercial growers.
Growing Potatoes: Tubers vs. True Seeds
Vegetative Propagation
Most potatoes are propagated vegetatively, meaning they are grown from “seed potatoes,” which are not true seeds but rather small tubers or pieces of tubers. These seed potatoes contain “eyes” or buds from which new plants sprout, ensuring genetic consistency and predictability with the parent plant. This method is widely favored in commercial food production due to its efficiency, rapid establishment, and the uniform crop it produces.
True Potato Seed (TPS)
Growing potatoes from true botanical seeds, often referred to as True Potato Seed (TPS), is a distinct process primarily utilized in plant breeding programs. Breeders leverage true seeds to develop new potato varieties, allowing for the introduction of enhanced traits such as disease resistance or specific culinary characteristics. Each plant grown from a true seed is genetically unique, leading to a diverse range of outcomes, unlike the genetic clones produced from tubers. While true seeds offer benefits like reduced disease transmission and easier, longer-term storage compared to tubers, the plants grown from them can be highly variable in yield and quality and typically take longer to produce marketable tubers.