A quick note about the thread heading. BBF stands for Banded Bee Farm, the farm I own a 50% share in. It is named after a native Australian bee, the Blue Banded Bee which is a solitary buzz pollinator, similar to though quite a bit smaller than a bumblebee - excellent at moving tomato pollen around!
Last season I had a single potato plant produce a single berry. I saved seed hoping to have at least a few viable seeds within. Happily this has turned out to be the case and I have about a dozen minuscule potato plants. Someone had also given me some seeds and from those I got one plant last season which gave me lots of tiny tubers. I have planted those this season hoping that they too might produce seed. I’ll plant the two together so that they can exchange pollen if they feel so moved.
I’ve been away, only got back today and discovered we’d had a frost. Not sure about the plants grown from TPS but the plants grown from tubers from a plant grown from TPS are all well and happy. Once interesting things start happening (berries forming, tuber harvest etc) I’ll post some more pics.
Sounds cool! Hopefully they do better than mine this year. They survived a couple frosts just fine and grew some tubers, but never made any berries.
Is it normal for you to have frost this late? I would have thought you would be well into summer weather since Northern US is well into winter weather.
@Alma frost this late is unusual but not unheard of. We are at 1000m (3300ft) altitde so night time radiant cooling can bring temps down pretty low. All the summer veg are suffering.
Two new (to me) varieties of potato have set berries. On the left is an Australian variety Pink Eye. There are lots of berries on these plants. On the right is a French variety Gourmandine only recently arrived in Australia and sold by one of the large supermarket chains. There is only one plant of this (I planted lots but only this one came up) but it has plenty of berries too. Of course, just because there are berries doesn’t mean there will be seeds but it does give me hope. In about six weeks I’ll cut a few berries open to see what, if anything, lies within. Fingers crossed!
I’m not sure about Australia, but in the USA and Europe, ‘Pink Eye’ is a synonym for Warba, a variety introduced in 1927.
It could well be the same cultivar. Pink Eye was first recorded in the state of Tasmania in 1944 and also goes by the name Southern Gold in that state I believe. It has yellow, waxy flesh, cream coloured skin and pinkish markings around the eyes.
Edit: some googling suggests that Warba Pink Eye has white flesh whereas the Pink Eye I’m growing has yellow flesh. It makes no difference really. As long as I get some viable seeds from the berries I’ll be quite content.