A potato from a tomato plant?

[RidgebackRanch]

Funny but you never know>

 

[AdamBorzy]

a unique horticultural technique producing topatos :bun

A meteorite? A satellite? As long as they dont come near my garden Im safe.

 

[RidgebackRanch]

This has been very strange. It has been confirmed by a couple of experts that I know that this is impossible. It was suggested that maybe an errant seed or piece of potato got in the bed. I would have notice the non tomato foliage.

The potatoes that I did plant were put in the ground in March and the tomatoes in this bed were planted in late May. We will do some extensive searching in this bed when the tomato plants get pulled this fall.

I will definately be saving some seeds from the tomatoes from this plant, but how could I grow the potato? If I planted it now there isn't enough time for it to produce either tubers or seeds. Would it be possible to store until next spring and plant it then?

 

[lesa]

Potatoes have a mind of their own... I would go ahead and plant it. I always manage to miss some potatoes - and I get lots of volunteer plants, that produce very well...Now, about that puppy.....

 

[digitS']

Trying to find an answer to your question about ideal seed storage: I searched on the net for Nora Olsen, who works at the Idaho potato storage research station for the U of I. She has written about home storage for kitchen use and seed storage for planting.

I thought that, perhaps, refrigerator storage would be best but loss of moisture in that environment showed that it can be less than ideal. Whatever the case, 38F appears to be the standard for seed storage.

To keep the tuber alive, it has to have some fresh air movement and too moist may result in disease problems. Depending on the depth of soil freezing in your area, storage may be best simply by putting the tuber back in the ground, maybe under a mulch as winter cold arrives.

I wonder if it might be fine to pot the tuber and allow it to grow thru the winter - just thinking out-loud here. Commercially, the first generation of seed potatoes is grown in a greenhouse. Under ideal conditions, I suspect that this is about a 60 day grow-out. After some time in storage (1 or 2 months?), the tubers could then be field-planted. That may mean that seed potato production could begin indoors in the fall and the seed planted outdoors in the spring . . .

Steve

 

[ninnymary]

I'm like Lesa, I want to know more about that puppy!

Mary

 

[897tgigvib]

I agree with digit. Some way needs to be done to find out how to best regrow this strangeling, as Luther Burbank himself might have called it.

I'll just think out loud a bit here some too. You live down south which should mean a good long season.

I'm not sure if Potatoes, strangelings or regulars, need to have their tubers go dormant for a certain period before resprouting or not.

But if the tuber needs no dormancy you should have a good 90 days to grow it out. I'm sure digit knows what he's saying, but to me, 60 days seems a bit minimal for potatoes. 60 days'd get you baby potatoes though. Maybe that's all that's needed.

Either way, a good dusting of sulphur, or at least some good wood ash, on the strangeling would protect it from rot.

More outloud thinking. If it really is a cross it'll be either POLYPLOID or TETRAPLOID, and will have an amazing set of GENES, in combinations rarely if ever seen. This kind of GENUS CROSS rarely happens in the SOLANACEAE family. In the BRASSICACEAE family however, Genus crosses happen quite a lot.

It may be good to contact CORNELL UNIVERSITY about this. UC DAVIS, and other agricultural schools would want to study the genetic makeup of this. It could become something important. They will want to know exactly what variety of potato was a parent, and what variety of Tomato.

Potatoes do have some TETRAPLOID varieties. I don't think there are any tetraploid Tomato varieties.

Some of those new true purple varieties of tomato are the result of new geneflow from a different species of wild tomato. There has been geneflow from wild tomatoes to domesticated tomatoes all along, and once in awhile a different wild species such as yellow currant tomato is crossed in.

What I'm getting at with this is that with the different species of tomato, (actually subspecies, but convention calls them species), there may have been an introduction of a chromosome that breaks successfully, or has a satellite portion that could behave as a separate chropmosome. That would be the sort of mechanism that could possibly allow the WIDE CROSS.

I have been readiung some recent scientific american magazines. There is now the ability to GENOME SEQUENCE an entire organism on a machine that costs a cool one thousand bucks. This machine is the size of a home computer printer. This means that universities all over the place will probably get one.

Whatever you do, save a piece of it. The above ground plant. Save a piece of it. Preserve its DNA.

 

[RidgebackRanch]

Steve and Marshall, I like how you two think. The people that tell it's impossible for this to happen can't give a reason based on the circumstances, but you two are telling me well it did happen and trying to keep it going is a good thing.

I agree, the potato will be planted and given the best of care. As for the tomato plant there are some fruit on it and they are actually turning red (it's never expected but always welcome here). I will save some seeds from those fruit for next year.

As for saving a piece of the above ground plant to preserve DNA, what would be the best way to do that? Freezing, drying...

Thank you all for your input, this is why this site is so wonderful. People sharing the passion that we all have!


Lesa and Mary, The puppys' name is Pickles. We got her at the grocery store while stocking up on canning jars (they were on sale). The lady giving away the puppies said she is an Australain Cattle Dog, other people have told me her ears are not right for that breed. We really don't care because she is so adoreable and pretty darn smart.

We are hoping that she can help with the Ridgeback in my avatar as he is having issues with epilepsy and the side effects of the meds, also our third dog is an aging lab that is not very interested in playing at that level.

The important thing is that we are all very happy with the addition to the family.

 

[lesa]

Pickles! How adorable! They never have puppies at my grocery store...probably a good thing. She looks like a beagle to me....Glad you have given her a happy home- with dog friends! Sorry to hear about the epilepsy. One of the puppies I was raising to be a guide dog for the blind had it. He ended up going to a nursing home, as a companion dog, since he was unable to be a guide dog.

 

[897tgigvib]

<<< Is definitely not an expert at preserving DNA, but I know they like it to be uncontaminated with as little other extraneous DNA as possible, which is actually nearly impossible. As uncontaminated as possible.

Get a piece of most definitely the same plant's leaf. Dry it bone dry. Don't cook it dry. Dry it like you'd dry seeds. After drying it, Put it in a baggy with some absorbent paper towels. Double bag it. Label it!

Do the same with a small piece of the tuber. Just a small piece should do. The size of a fingernail trimming. Label that too.

Do not lose these puppies. Don't let them get rotten. Dry is more important than cold.

Look up some local universities or colleges' webpages. Get hold of a real professor, then call her.

At Cornell there are actually several departments that'd be interested in this.

First thing of course they'll do is check to see if they actually came from the same plant, and were not simply hopelessly entangled together. They also might check to see if some fungus or insect damage could cause a tomato root to swell up like a tuber. Something akin to an Oak Gall. In other words, they'll do the "parsimonious" thing scientists do, check for the simplest solutions first. (I love that word parsimonious! First time I saw it I thought it was a scientific cuss word!)