POTATOES FROM SEED.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 56, 7 March 1914, Page 11

POTATOES FROM SEED.

Race betterment among potatoes is promised by three French experts, who have succeeded in producing potato-bearing plants from seeds. The leaders in this iiew vegetable sex hygiene aro Sartory, Graliot, and Thiebaut, who declare that many centuries of sexual cultivation of potatoes has so enfeebled the present race ,of roots that they easily fall a prey to various potato diseases which a young and healthy race of plants would be able to resist. Potato seed planted in the ordinary way fails to produce plant 3 with potatobearing roots, but the experts found that in conjunction with certain ground mushrooms the potato seed would produce as desired. The mushrooms, by attaching •themselves to the young plant, provoke the formation of potatoes. The 1913 crop from sixty plants consisted of potatoes about the size of a walnut, though some ran larger. The best of these roots were again planted in 1913, and it is announced that they have produced vigorous fruit-healing plants entirely free from any of the common potato ailments.