Episode three of the second season of Free the Seed! the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast

This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners and food curious folks who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your seed catalogues and onto your tables. In each episode, we hear the story of a variety that has been pledged as open-source from the plant breeder that developed it.

In this episode, host Rachel Hultengren spoke with Bill Whitson about 'Rozette', a new potato variety that Bill developed and pledged as open-source.

Be sure to check out Bill's blog post about selecting 'Rozette', which includes more photos of the candidate lines that he considered during the project: https://www.cultivariable.com/potato-the-story-of-rozette/

Bill Whitson

'Ozette' potato tubers; 'Ozette' flower; minitubers from true seed of 'Ozette'; first generation of 'Rozette' (Photo credit: Bill Whitson)

Episode links

- Visit the Cultivariable website to purchase true potato seeds and tubers. (Please note that Cultivariable is taking a break from selling tubers this year in order to focus on growing clonal crops from tissue culture, so 'Rozette' will likely be available next in 2020).

- Kenosha Potato Project http://kenoshapotato.com/

- Slow Food Ark of Taste https://www.fondazioneslowfood.com/en/slow-food-presidia/makah-ozette-potato/

- Carol Deppe’s Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties

Let us know what you think of the show!Free the Seed! Listener Survey: http://bit.ly/FreetheSeedsurvey

Free the Seed! Transcript for S2E3: Rozette Potato

Rachel Hultengren: Welcome to episode three of the second season of Free the Seed!, the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast that tells the stories of new crop varieties and the plant breeders that develop them. I’m your host, Rachel Hultengren. Every episode we invite a plant breeder to tell us about a crop variety that they’ve pledged to be open-source.

My guest today is Bill Whitson. Bill is the owner of Cultivariable, an experimental nursery on the central coast of Washington state.  He breeds a large number of minor crop species, but focuses on the Andean root and tuber crops mashua, oca, ulluco, yacon, and potato.  In the past ten years, he has released 37 new varieties belonging to nine species and all varieties released since 2013 have been OSSI pledged.

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Rachel Hultengren: Hi Bill – welcome to the show!

Bill Whitson: Hi Rachel, thanks for having me!

Rachel Hultengren: Yeah, we’re really excited to get to chat today! So we’ll be talking about your potato breeding, and specifically about a variety you’ve just released, ‘Rozette’, but first maybe we could take a broad view to start, and then focus in. So let’s talk about the natural history of potatoes. Where in the world are potatoes from, and how long have they been cultivated there?

Bill Whitson: So we don’t really know how long potatoes have been cultivated, but they originated in the highlands of the central Andes, so think southern Peru and Bolivia. And they were probably first domesticated something like 10,000 years ago. And those landraces and lines of potatoes are now a distinctive group known as ‘Andean potatoes’, or Solanum tuberosum andigenum, which are varieties that are primarily adapted to grow in short-day photoperiods.

So what that means is that they don’t produce tubers until the daylength falls to 12 hours or less. And that’s because they evolved near the equator, where the day length changes very little. And this is a common feature you see in tropical plants. That’s kind of an inconvenient feature if you’re growing away from the equator, where the daylength changes a lot.

Because, for example, in North America we don’t have a 12 hour day length until fall. So about September 22nd is when we get to that p...