[Tom Wagner]

Note that Yukon Gold is a hybrid, and since potatoes are diploid, you can get unbelievable variations in subsequent generations.

Morgan, most commercial varieties are hybrids, but Yukon Gold and most other commercial varieties are tetraploid, not diploid as you stated. Tetraploids are like two plants in one, and the variability in the selfed and/or hybridized seed is even more unbelievable.Diploids have 24 chromosomes, tetraploids have 48!

This is why getting good TPS is so hard. It takes years of selections and crossing to get viable TPS of varieties worth growing year-to-year.

It is not as difficult as you may have read. If you want perfect potatoes, and super high yields, and high specific gravities, and a certain type of skin, and a specific pathogen resistance, and on and on....then the odds are against you. But if you are tolerant of a wider diversity of potatoes that don't have to fit a preconceived idea of commercial acceptance, then you have most of the BELL CURVE of OK potatoes. It's the template upon template upon template that eliminates some otherwise fine potatoes.

Stable, good TPS is the holy grail and it's been tried with mixed success in S.E. Asia.

If you mean (stable, good TPS) that produces a very narrow type of potato where each seedling has to be a dead ringer for a Russet Burbank, then you may be right. But accepting a variety of russetting, with round, oval, oblong, and longs in the mix, then you may be much more obliging.

Most TPS seed for sale is either OP or hybrid lines that will throw 100% white skinned potatoes. There will be some yield differences, but the tubers can be marketed as a group.

TPS is a great way to get new varieties of disease free potatoes. If the first generation of tubers from a mixed sibling base is screened for type, saving only the 1%, 10%, 25%, or more of the bulk harvest, the selected prototypes can be replanted for a one time harvest. This way is best if you want every tuber to be yellow fleshed, or red skinned, or fingerling shaped, etc., with a wide diversity of traits in other ways not so visible.


With my fifty some years of selecting potatoes from true seed, I have some quite stable genetics within parental lines. I've made berry setting a priority, so that multigeneration progenies later, I have lines in all colors and classes that make for good potential hybrids.
My information and clonal potatoes are mostly in house, so you may not be able to google TPS and see my results. The industry in the USA is against TPS simply because they want a Katahdin, a Cascade, a Red LaSoda, a Yukon Gold, a Ranger Russet, a Banana Fingerling, a Caribe, and if it is not exactly that...they don't want it, and they think the market place won't want it either.

I am looking forward to the day when people will respect diversity rather than scorn it.

Tom Wagner