Any Reason Not To Grow Potatoes From the Grocery Store

[karstopography]

Son brought home a bag of smaller Russets from the food bank. The reason he brought them home is they had a massive surplus and these were on the edge of going bad or simply going bad. They threw away many bags, unfortunately. We got to pick out a few out the bag he brought home, the better ones for dinner, and the rest will be either composted or I will plant them. These aren’t very russeted, the skins almost look like a smooth gold type.

Anyway, they are now almost all sprouting and our potato planting date is fast approaching. Russet potatoes aren’t normally found at the feed store here as seed potatoes, but I thought if I got these planted on the early side of the planting date window maybe I’d get a decent crop of russets before the heat shuts them down. Don’t Russet potatoes tend to be longer DTM than the many of the red, yellow and white seed potatoes? Potatoes here generally go into the soil early in February, but some planting Calendars have January 15th as the start.

[bower]

If they have good sprouts, and no obvious disease issues, I see no reason not to plant them. I've grown potatoes from supermarket sprouters and it was fine.
Some potatoes sold for food are treated with sprout inhibitors. I had a bag of potatoes I really liked, and kept a couple that had rudimentary sprouts and planted them. They looked alive to me but they didn't grow. Not sure if it was a sprout inhibitor or something else used to prevent folks growing them out. When I looked them up online to try and find seed potatoes, I discovered they were a patented type with only one exclusive grower. Whatever they treated the spuds with, it was effective!

[brownrexx]

I have planted store potatoes before and had no problem. The fear is that they carry disease because they are not certified disease free but I seriously doubt that it is much of a risk especially is they do not have any diseased looking spots.

[Paulf]

Two or three years ago we bought a couple of bags of yellow potatoes from Costco. One bag we ate and really enjoyed the potatoes. There was no variety listed. The other bag of potatoes began to sprout like crazy and since it was in April I just made space in the garden for that ten pounds. They grew like no others had ever done and tasted even better than the bag full we ate earlier. No disease, large tubers. I have not seen potatoes in the store like that since, but that would become my "go to" seed potatoes if I could find them again.

[slugworth]

I never had a problem.
The ones I had were determinate type so no hilling needed.

[worth1]

You can grow all sorts of stuff from the grocery store.
The list is almost endless.
The first wild potatoes were small and poisonous.
By picking the one's that weren't the Inca or more accurately the people before them managed to domesticate the things.
How they did this I have no idea but that's what they say.

[greenthumbomaha]

https://www.vegetables.cornell.edu/pest ... tato-scab/

I've always avoided using store potatoes out of caution to not introduce scab into my soil. Apparently it isn't as much of an issue unless there are special circumstances. Certified seed potatoes are cheap and sold all over the place, so one less thing to deal with seems good to me.

- Lisa

[Stitchingmom]

Growing grocery store tomatoes is illegal in Idaho, and I believe in some other states. A disease started in such a way could wipe out our state. I guess you could grow in containers, but I don't know how you would dispose of the soil without having it end up mixing at some point with regular soil.

[peebee]

I've gotten potatoes from my compost pile before, from just some peelings that had the eyes intact I guess. So I buried cut up Yukon Golds once or twice, in a proper garden bed & also in fabric pot.
But this time I want to grow some harder to find varieties like fingerling types. Thinking of going to my local farmers market to look for some. Will do the Ruth Stout method.

[worth1]

The Great Texas Potato Famine linked to South East Texas man.
Manhunt continues.

[Tormato]

Speaking of growing things from the grocery store...

I have a few carrot oddities, from a 5 pound bag. The carrots are about 2 inches wide and 4 inches long, basically cylindrical with no taper. I'm going to plant a few next week (temps are supposed to get into the 60's, so the soil will not be frozen). I don't know if they will regrow in the spring.

[worth1]

I've been trying to get elbow macaroni to sprout for years now with no results.
I'm about ready to give up and try shell macaroni instead.

[Uncle_Feist]

My brother grew a hamburger bun tree from seed once.

[Shule]

I wouldn't do it.

I don't know about the laws and potatoes in Texas, but in Idaho, you could get in serious legal trouble for that.

The disease risk is probably greater than most people realize, too, from what I've studied on the topic. Apparently, there was (if not still is) a big nematode problem in Idaho. I don't remember the species of nematode (not RKN), but it didn't sound like something I wanted in my garden, and it sounded like spreading them was pretty much a sure thing if you planted potatoes that were grown from infected areas. I often see still-edible potatoes with visible disease symptoms, too; I forgot which disease it is—maybe some kind of virus. Not all passable diseases are visible on carriers, as I understand it.

Anyway, I'm leery of planting anything that isn't true seed, even if it's not from the produce isle. We got Verticillium from a couple store-bought vegetable plants (I didn't know what it was at the time; I hoped it was just a nutrient deficiency) and it spread over the entire garden very quickly (probably due to mite or thrip carriers). That's not the sort of thing I want to repeat. That wasn't on potatoes, initially, but any disease-free potatoes we plant now seem to get infected by it pretty fast, and potatoes seem to be tied for our most susceptible crop, along with strawberries.

When crops are grown in large numbers, disease can be a bigger problem. So, I wouldn't discount the warnings about infected produce. They might be doing a lot of stuff to minimize symptoms.

Another risk is they might be genetically engineered and/or patented, and you really don't know what variety it is, even if they tell you (because they tend to use inductive logic when naming things there for marketing purposes).

[worth1]

Here's my take on it.
Other than the fact of how seed potatoes are produced in the first place of which you can look up.
Many people do this not realizing they have introduced something into their soil.
It can take several years to realize this only to be blaming bad yields on other factors during that period of years.
I grew some red potatoes from the store once and all the potatoes harvested had what looked to me like scab.
No idea how what or where it came from.

[worth1]

Every time potato diseases come up I end up spending hours reading about the Irish potato famine.
What a nightmare for these poor devils being dependent on a single source of nourishment.

[slugworth]

Burger King tomatoes stripped off a whopper.
Nuking has no effect on the seeds.
Hot peppers from the shakers in pizza places.

[worth1]

Did a sprout test on grocery store black mustard seeds.
They sprouted in about 48 hours.

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[karstopography]

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I went ahead and composted the grocery store russets. Something seemed off or not normal on how they were sprouting.

Anyway, Seed potatoes are relatively inexpensive here. I picked up these Red Pontiac certified seed potatoes (grown in Minnesota) yesterday at the feed store. $3.09 for the lot. Their Kennebec and Yukon golds weren’t in just yet. Going to let these sprout some more before planting hopefully early in February. I liked the size of these and rather not cut them if I can find ones this size.

[GoDawgs]

@karstopography , I get the small ones too to eliminate the cutting. One less thing to worry about. My feed & seed said they'll be getting theirs in near the end of the month and will call when they come in. It's usually Red Norland, Yukons and Kennebec.