Saving the Green Mountain Potato
Late blight, responsible for famines in the northern hemisphere, arrived in the U.S. in 1840, and a considerable effort to develop resistant potato varieties soon followed. One of the earliest achievements was the Green Mountain potato, developed by Orson Alexander of the University of Vermont in 1878 and released seven years later. While not considered late-blight resistant by today’s standards, the variety offered heavy yields, great flavor and versatile culinary uses. It became the dominant potato variety grown in New England.
By the 1950s, however, mechanized industry favored potatoes with a more consistent shape and size, and new russet potatoes began to replace the old Green Mountains. Still, it held on as a staple for homesteaders and gardeners for the rest of the century.
In the early 2000s, the Slow Food Ark of Taste highlighted the variety as being on the decline, and in 2020 the very last of the available certified seed was offered in our catalog. (See: What is certified potato seed?)
Responding to the outpouring of customer requests for Green Mountain, we set our sights on saving the vanishing breed. We teamed up with a family in Maine that grows foundation seed potatoes for the majority of growers on the eastern seaboard and beyond, and they were able to find a clean source of Green Mountain tissue maintained by the Maine Potato Board. In 2022 the first new plantlets were grown in beds of sterile soil to produce a batch of minitubers, which in 2023 were grown out into seed potatoes. This new generation of certified Green Mountain seed is available exclusively to Fedco customers, 146 years after its first introduction.
Seed Potatoes
Solanum tuberosum One pound of seed will usually plant 5–8 row feet, depending on the variety; 10# will usually plant 50 row feet.
- Early potatoes mature in 65-80 days.
- Midseason potatoes mature in 80-90 days
- Late potatoes mature in more than 90 days