Potato plants produce flowers, fruits and seeds but they never grow from the seeds. Why?

Potatoes are usually grown from "seed potatoes" which are neatly cut from a potato to have one to two "eyes" which are the buds.

The reason why potatoes do not follow the regular convention of flowers and seeds is because they are underground shoots i.e their roots store starch to form tubers and from these starch deposits,new shoots grow.

Potato plants produce flowers, fruits and seeds but they never grow from the seeds. Why?
They do produce seeds. That is where they get the term "seed potato". This is where potato has been allowed to mature, has flowered, been fertilised by another plant, had fruit and has set seed. These seeds have been planted, and have produced tubers, which are sold as seed potatoes. In Australia, at least, commercial growers are only allowed to plant seed potatoes which have been produced in this way. This cross pollination ensures genetic diversity, and avoids massive losses such as happened during the Irish famine last century, where clonal (non-seed) potatoes, reduced diversity, making most of the Irish crop susceptible to potato blight, wiping out enough of this staple crop to cause famine, and forcing a mass emigration of Irish people, particularly to the US and Australia. (On the upside, they did bring Guinness with them.)



Just for your interest, potato fruit look like tomatoes, and are quite toxic.

colonial shoe buckles