This is my ongoing release program to the wild as a feral potato. I’m trying to re-create a mini-potato oasis in the middle of a field. I’ve done these many times before over the last couple of decades. I no longer give them proper names because I don’t know long they would stick around.  Now I use the rather impersonal alphabet method and call them all “Quantum” borrowed out of a physics 101 textbook. That way I don’t feel so bad if “Bob” or his potato friends die. (Which by the way they frequently do.)  I just tell them they are returning to infinity where nothing is lost. They go along with it for now. The alphabet like a neutron star will likely be around for a while. Bob, not so much. This year I went from A to M each of which was grown from true seed, produced by a fruit and is genetically different. “Bob” comes from a long line of healthy potatoes completely cut off from commercialization. He is super productive, yet I hear he is searching for new real estate to reestablish his roots. This is what he told me.  

“The definition humans use as wild is not that wild. My home is were you plant me. This is my nativeness.”

There is no breeding back or back-breeding to wild. There is no back door to creating wild through extreme domestication by crossing wild potatoes. This already exists in the potato. It keeps its genetic background “quietly active” until new conditions present themselves. This is where you will see things that have remained dormant for centuries.

It finally dawned on me that I needed to expand the range of the species in different soils and locations throughout my farm to allow the plants to flex their genome.  I create my cute little mini potato plantings in the midst of fields and trees. The colony is now in 15 selections all genetically different growing under oaks, walnuts, hickories. This is the wild and its not that wild.  The idea is to create conditions favorable to the plants yet not too luxurious. You want to see what selections will fruit and what selections will remain alive and thriving for the next several years as a perennial potato in a cold climate similar to the Jerusalem artichoke. The goal is to have self-reproducing colonies able to grow amidst other plants and left to go as a source of future potatoes. Some could join the greater commercial potato industry but it is not a priority. This time the potatoes like the feral honeybees resistant to varroa mites found in southern California recently are able to fend off insects in a way no domestication program would ever work. It is effortless and does it without the plant breeder. Home free. It’s wild out there. 

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus