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'Climbing potato' strange growth pattern what's happening?

 
 
Reply Sat 3 Aug, 2013 09:40 am
Last year a potato set fruit and this year I ahve grown some of the seeds. Two of the plants showed a strange tendency to put out tendrils as if climbing or scrambling. http://pics.davesgarden.com/pics/2013/06/01/cinemike/8b832a.jpg

Only one survived the ravages of a family of snails in the greenhouse, but that survivor is now behaving even stranger. The tendrils are now dying down, but they are growing what look like flowering or fruiting structures on the tendrils.
http://pics.davesgarden.com/pics/2013/08/03/cinemike/ff8875.jpg
What is going on here???
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Type: Question • Score: 0 • Views: 857 • Replies: 5
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PUNKEY
 
  1  
Reply Sat 3 Aug, 2013 10:51 am
Why are your plants still in the pots?

How does this plant grow? It looks like that's how it spreads and there's no soil there for it to attach to.


cinemike
 
  1  
Reply Sat 3 Aug, 2013 02:17 pm
@PUNKEY,
It is incredibly difficult to keep slugs and snails away from small plants once they are planted in the soil of my garden, so I keep them in pots which I protect from slugs and snails by various methods. In fact it is only the 'climber' which is still in the pot, the rest are in makeshift tubs.

All of the other ones grew normally and produced their mini-tubers as I was told they would, it was only this one which went strange.

It attached itself to all of the weeds growing in the pot and also some of the larger plants growing in nearby pots.
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Butrflynet
 
  1  
Reply Sat 3 Aug, 2013 03:52 pm
@cinemike,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato

Quote:
Potato plants are herbaceous perennials that grow about 60 cm (24 in) high, depending on variety, the culms dying back after flowering. They bear white, pink, red, blue, or purple flowers with yellow stamens. In general, the tubers of varieties with white flowers have white skins, while those of varieties with colored flowers tend to have pinkish skins.[15] Potatoes are cross-pollinated mostly by insects, including bumblebees, which carry pollen from other potato plants, but a substantial amount of self-fertilizing occurs as well. Tubers form in response to decreasing day length, although this tendency has been minimized in commercial varieties.[16]


Potato plants
After potato plants flower, some varieties produce small green fruits that resemble green cherry tomatoes, each containing up to 300 true seeds. Potato fruit contains large amounts of the toxic alkaloid solanine and is therefore unsuitable for consumption. All new potato varieties are grown from seeds, also called "true seed" or "botanical seed" to distinguish it from seed tubers. By finely chopping the fruit and soaking it in water, the seeds separate from the flesh by sinking to the bottom after about a day (the remnants of the fruit float). Any potato variety can also be propagated vegetatively by planting tubers, pieces of tubers, cut to include at least one or two eyes, or also by cuttings, a practice used in greenhouses for the production of healthy seed tubers. Some commercial potato varieties do not produce seeds at all (they bear imperfect flowers) and are propagated only from tuber pieces. Confusingly, these tubers or tuber pieces are called "seed potatoes," because the potato itself functions as "seed".
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Butrflynet
 
  0  
Reply Sat 3 Aug, 2013 03:55 pm
@cinemike,
Regarding the tendrils, aka culms:

Quote:
Potato plants are herbaceous perennials that grow about 60 cm (24 in) high, depending on variety, the culms dying back after flowering. They bear white, pink, red, blue, or purple flowers with yellow stamens.
cinemike
 
  2  
Reply Sun 4 Aug, 2013 02:09 am
@Butrflynet,
No.
Nothing to do with culms. Culms are the leaves and stems of the plant which, from the photo you can clearly see that this is not the case.

It is easy to look up potato on wikipedia. I can do that.

I have since found that this is, in fact, a parasite Cuscuta pentagona (the field dodder).

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