Most potatoes consumed in the UK are part of the same plant!

Look up any article, ask any relative or ai agent, they’ll tell you the way to grow your own potatoes is to plant seed potatoes or make your own seed potatoes from store bought potatoes.

I had always assumed that inside potatoes there were some tiny seeds that you can’t see or something. But in reality when we’re planting a seed potato we’re planting a part of another plant. As a root vegetable the potato is a tuber, part of the root of the plant.

So when we plant our king Edwards or Maris Pipers were planting part of the original plant bred for the particular characteristics that potato has, most of them dating back to the 1970s.

If you’ve grown potatoes yourself you may have seen potato berries, small green fruits that hang off the plants above ground, these are kind of like tomatoes but with a thick green skin and probably an awful taste. This is where the real seeds live, and you can cut these open, wash the flesh out and dry them and then you can grow your own potatoes from seeds.

There’s pros and cons of doing this. Firstly, if you succeed you’ve just invented your own potato variety! And you can name it, market it, sell it and become the next King Edward yourself. However your potatoes might not be the beautiful floury baking spuds of the parent plant. As your potato plant has bred with another unknown plant (probably one of your other potato plants, which is actually part of the same plant, if you see what I’m saying) you may lose some characteristics of the original, and gain some new ones!

So by all means give it a go, create your own potato empire, but don’t bank on the custom potatoes feeding your family for the winter.