I had a volunteer potato in my garden this year so I just let it do its thing (Completely overshadowing all of my corn but oh well). It flowered and now suddenly there are… berries??? I’ve literally never seen these before, what are these?
Nightshades be nightshading
You need to grow these until they become blue. Grind up the berries into a powder. Put that powder into pill capsules. You need to find people have money and live alone and sell these pills to them as some kind of drug they’d be interested in.
You’re going to need spend a few days with them as they enter near-comatose state due to the drug and instruct them to do seemingly odd tasks while also preparing to suggest to them that they need to give you all of their money. Make sure you’re not seen during any of this and leave no trace. Leave once this is finished.
smurfing people after they’ve smurfed your smurfberries
Yes, that’s normal. But don’t eat it, they’re mildly poisonous.
Apparently they’re caused by cooler weather and contain seeds! Do not eat them, as they tend to be rather poisonous
Can I plant them?
Usually yes, but that’s not very efficient. Seed-grown potatoes are very fragile and need special care. Having a bulb as a fallback for nutrients is what gives potato resilience. They grow a lot like tomatoes. Usually people only do that to get new breeds. Since, technically, planting a bulb is cloning.
yes, wait until they ripen and the berries get soft, then squeeze the seeds out. note that potatoes don’t grow true - a potato grown from seed will be different from its parent. normally potatoes are propagated with little chunks of potato and those are clones. potatoes grown from seed are like apples grown from seed - a bit random
Cool. How would I go about best preserving said seeds?
probably wash the potato berry goop off and dry them but idk, search ‘how to grow potato berries’. if you search how to grow potatoes from seed you’re going to get a bunch of stuff about using seed potatoes (which aren’t actual potato seeds)
Huh, now I’m curious! These don’t look ripe, I’m thinking you would save the seeds of the berries the same way as a tomato. Wonder if it would be like a hybrid plant where the seeds will produce a random plant that might not really grow potatoes, unlike the clones your producing by replanting the tubers.
welcome to my tomacco farm
Wonder if it would be like a hybrid plant where the seeds will produce a random plant that might not really grow potatoes
You’d probably still get potatoes but the size/quality/quantity would be random.
they tend to be rather poisonous
Nightshade moment.
Those are the tomato part of the potato plant. They’re poisonous because both tomatoes and potatoes are nightshades. You can make those grow into tomatoes or egg plants if you do a few hundred years of selective breeding.
You can make those grow into tomatoes or egg plants if you do a few hundred years of selective breeding.
You can graft tomatos & eggplants to potato rootstock, they take very readily, but it cuts production on both, and i wouldnt recommend a cherry tomato graft for hopefully obvious reasons.
I should do a pomato graft for fun
been thinking about this too.