Have you ever bit into a french fry and found a potato seed?

If I asked you how to plant potatoes, you'd probably tell me to go buy some certified seed potatoes, cut them, place in a trench, and "hill" them as they grow, right? Perhaps you'd tell me to place them in tires or barrels or some homemade potato crate.

But these "seed potatoes" are not really seeds…they are "tubers" which will grow plants from the eyes. So if that potato came from a previous plant that came from a "seed potato" (or tuber), and that plant came from a tuber….somehow, there MUST have been a seed at some point, right? Else where did the first potato come from? Panspermia?

Amazingly enough, potato plants actually produce seed pods (sorry, your french fries will not have seeds), and you can plant potatoes from this seed. The really interesting thing is that when you plant a seed potato (tuber), it will be an exact genetic clone of its parent. But, when you plant from a seed, you're likely to get some varying results…who knows, you could accidentally create a potato variety which produces football-sized tubers!

Give it a try!

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