Athlete

Grown this season from seed (not seed potatoes) provided by Alan Romans, this new variety is called Athlete. I haven’t tried them yet, but they look quite good, with very little scab. I’ll grow a few on next year.

These were grown in the tunnel and ended up fighting with tomatoes at one end and rocket at the other. That might have something to do with the patchy sizes of the tubers. We’ll see how they fare next year.

*** Update from Alan Romans ***

I clearly didn't explain the situation well enough. Sorry. You received a packet of SMV11Ath seeds. These started as a Sarpo Mira cross with Valor. I placed Valor pollen on the stigma of Sarpo Mira to produce a fruit containing many seeds. These were germinated and grown on. Selection 11 of these seeds produced a plant which produced flowers which I successfully crossed with Athlete pollen. Athlete is an established variety with excellent blight resistance. Your seeds contain a mixture of the genes from 3 different varieties, each having a history of blight resistance (Valor is no longer classed as blight resistant but has many other desirable characteristics). Because a potato has 4 copies of each of its many chromosomes there is considerable variation possible and every seedling grown on will be different in some way genetically from every other seedling. We need to select the handful of "good" varieties from the hundreds of seedlings.