Like most plants potato plants do actually produce seeds, but potato seeds are not the ideal way to plant or grow potatoes. If you’ve grown potatoes before you likely have grown them from the seed potatoes which are just potatoes. This method of growing potatoes is producing clones of the plant from the tuber. So why don’t we use potato seeds?
Potato Flowers
Potatoes are not great at producing seeds in the first place. Potato flowers that grow often don’t produce fruit and by extension don’t produce seeds. These flowers almost always wither and die back before the plant can make it to the final stage of seed production a bear fruit.
Potato Fruit
In the unlikely even that potatoes do bear fruit and produce seeds you’ll see what looks like small tomatoes. The potato is closely related to the tomato as they are both in the nightshade family of plants. Unlike the tomato though, potato fruit contains solanine and is highly toxic. Eating the fruit, or any non-potato part of the potato plant can make you very sick or in extreme cases even kill you!
These fruit, like tomatoes contain hundreds of tiny potato seeds which could hypothetically be used to grow new potato plants.
Why Potato Seeds are Bad For Planting
When you plant a potato to get more potato plants you get a clone of a plant that produces well and yields plentiful harvests. When you plant a potato seed you get a genetically different plant that likely won’t produce well or could have all sorts of traits you don’t want. While it’s easy to take for granted that many plants we grow in the garden grow just fine, that’s the product of hundreds of years of hard work by diligent individuals crossbreeding and preserving the best varieties so we can produce even better yields from our crops. While we won’t get into the ethics of plant hybridization here, we will say that planting potato seeds undoes a lot of that good work and leaves you with often sub-optimal plants.
Is There any Reason to Plant Potatoes from Seeds?
Botanists, farmers, and experienced crossbreeds plant potatoes from seeds all the time. These potatoes are not for getting a good food crop though, these potatoes are specifically to try and select for new traits. Often pest resistant varieties of crops are not caused by the work of genetic engineering, but instead by carefully selecting plants that are naturally resistant and then breeding that trait into others. Similarly new varieties of potatoes occur all the time, and this is often the work of people planting potatoes from seed. While it’s not something the home gardener would likely do, it does have its place in agricultural science.
Potatoes are a Wonderfully Weird Plant
Potatoes are odd, from their ability to product inedible fruit, to their habit of making poisonous potatoes if they’re exposed to the sun. While they’re weird for sure, they’re also a historical staple food that finds its way into cultural dishes all over the world. Potatoes are a wonderful plant to grow, just so long as you’re not growing them from seed. If you’re interested in growing the best potatoes you can check out our article on how to grow potatoes at home.