Uploaded November 2018 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago
This is a potato reveal, but these potatoes were grown from tubers of my highest yielding TPS seedling from 2017. My working title for this clone is Tollocan #11, but I've started calling it Yog Shogoth, after the father of the Dunwich Horror and its little brother in H. P. Lovecraft's short story of the same name. I'm not actually a big fan of Lovecraft, I find him pretty hard to read, but I liked that story and loved the sound of "Yog Shogoth. It also sort of illustrates my ambivalence towards this potato, it is kind of an extreme, unruly, weird potato that I can't make my mind up about whether having it around is a good idea. Kind of like having Yog Shogoth for a son-in-law might result in your grandkids being giant invisible monsters that eat your neighbors cows, which lowers the property values for everyone.
I am trying to become more selective about which potato clones I keep for growing on in following seasons, so I need to get an idea of the average yield per plant. There are differences in the way a potato variety grows in the seedling year compared to grown from a tuber in following seasons. I think you can get a pretty good idea of what the texture, flesh, and skin color will be from a seedling. But the average yield per plant seems to be something you can only truly assess from growing from the tubers, also, the average size and shape and number of the tubers the plant makes can often change relative to the seedling year. It is not at all unusual for the tubers to be larger, and more prone to defects like secondary growth, cracking, and hollow heart, it also seems that tuber grown plants seem to have fewer, larger tubers per plant than seedling plants. This is all based on my own observations, I cannot back any of that up with scientific papers suggesting this is true.
The potato grown in this video produced 4 pounds of ping pong ball sized tubers in its seedling year. This season the average yields seems to be about 2 pounds 3 ounces, but the tubers are much larger in size on average. They aren't all tiny ping pong balls.
It can be difficult to decide which clones to keep and which to drop. This is a good potato from some measures, but it is also a challenging potato to grow, it sprouts long stolons in all directions and produces potatoes 3-4 feet from the seed piece at times. So it is necessary to dig over a large area to find the potatoes. This is a pain. It also produces HUGE plants that flop over in all directions so it can swamp other potato rows or other plants you have adjacent to them. In addition it is a waxy potato with somewhat variably dark purple flesh combined with white. It isn't the most beautiful spud to look at. Should I keep Yog Shogoth and grow it in future seasons? I probably will for at least one more year. It is an unusual variety, and I like unusual potatoes. I probably won't plant anything like this long of a row of them next year though.
This is a potato reveal, but these potatoes were grown from tubers of my highest yielding TPS seedling from 2017. My working title for this clone is Tollocan #11, but I've started calling it Yog Shogoth, after the father of the Dunwich Horror and its little brother in H. P. Lovecraft's short story of the same name. I'm not actually a big fan of Lovecraft, I find him pretty hard to read, but I liked that story and loved the sound of "Yog Shogoth. It also sort of illustrates my ambivalence towards this potato, it is kind of an extreme, unruly, weird potato that I can't make my mind up about whether having it around is a good idea. Kind of like having Yog Shogoth for a son-in-law might result in your grandkids being giant invisible monsters that eat your neighbors cows, which lowers the property values for everyone.
I am trying to become more selective about which potato clones I keep for growing on in following seasons, so I need to get an idea of the average yield per plant. There are differences in the way a potato variety grows in the seedling year compared to grown from a tuber in following seasons. I think you can get a pretty good idea of what the texture, flesh, and skin color will be from a seedling. But the average yield per plant seems to be something you can only truly assess from growing from the tubers, also, the average size and shape and number of the tubers the plant makes can often change relative to the seedling year. It is not at all unusual for the tubers to be larger, and more prone to defects like secondary growth, cracking, and hollow heart, it also seems that tuber grown plants seem to have fewer, larger tubers per plant than seedling plants. This is all based on my own observations, I cannot back any of that up with scientific papers suggesting this is true.
The potato grown in this video produced 4 pounds of ping pong ball sized tubers in its seedling year. This season the average yields seems to be about 2 pounds 3 ounces, but the tubers are much larger in size on average. They aren't all tiny ping pong balls.
It can be difficult to decide which clones to keep and which to drop. This is a good potato from some measures, but it is also a challenging potato to grow, it sprouts long stolons in all directions and produces potatoes 3-4 feet from the seed piece at times. So it is necessary to dig over a large area to find the potatoes. This is a pain. It also produces HUGE plants that flop over in all directions so it can swamp other potato rows or other plants you have adjacent to them. In addition it is a waxy potato with somewhat variably dark purple flesh combined with white. It isn't the most beautiful spud to look at. Should I keep Yog Shogoth and grow it in future seasons? I probably will for at least one more year. It is an unusual variety, and I like unusual potatoes. I probably won't plant anything like this long of a row of them next year though.
