Where in the United States did at one time; potatoes grown wild?

Answer 1

As far as I know potatoes grew wild in Peru South America. But looking into some research the range of potato that could have been found in the wild is extensive. See my second reference.

The first cultivated potato was grown in what is now Peru, researchers say, and it originated only once, not several times, as some experts propose.

The genetic study shows the first potato known to have been farmed is genetically closest to a species now found only in southern Peru, the US and UK researchers write online, ahead of print, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"This result shows the potato originated one time and from a species that was distributed in southern Peru," says Professor David Spooner, a US Department of Agriculture researcher at the University of Wisconsin, who led the study.

The findings challenge theories that potatoes were first cultivated in Bolivia or Argentina, or that farmers bred them several different times in several different places.

"The origin of crop plants has long fascinated botanists, archaeologists, and sociologists with the following fundamental questions: when, where, how, why, and how many times did crop domestication occur? What are the wild progenitors of these crops?" the researchers write.

The study did not address when the first potato would have been cultivated, but other research suggests it would have been between 7000 and 10,000 years ago.

A single species

Potatoes are a major food staple around the world and mostly belong to a single species Solanum tuberosum.

Baking potatoes, red potatoes, golden potatoes and other favourites all originated in southern Chile, neighbouring Peru, Spooner says.

The Chilean potato that gave rise to modern potatoes is probably a hybrid of the ancestral Peruvian potato and a wild species found in Bolivia and Argentina, Spooner says.

But in South America, many other cultivated potatoes are eaten.

"There are many different colours: solid and mottled and dotted from white to tan to purple to red," Spooner says.

Fossil potatoes dating back 7000 years have been found.

Looking to genetics

For their study, Spooner and colleagues did genetic comparisons of 261 wild relatives of potatoes and 98 so-called landrace types, which are primitive cultivated crops grown by indigenous peoples.

The researchers believe their findings show a single species, S. bukasovii, gave rise to the first known cultivated potato.

But it would not have closely resembled the big, pale fleshy tubers that people crave today, Spooner says.

"The wild species, many of them have tubers, the potato part you eat, that is tiny, sometimes the size of a pea," he says.

"Oftentimes they are mildly poisonous."

From this second source below, there is a suggestion that potatoes could have grown from a wild state in the American Southwest which would mean proabably the New Mexico and Arizona area.

Cultivated potatoes all belong to one botanical species, Solanum tuberosum, but it includes thousands of varieties that vary by size, shape, color, and other sensory characteristics. The potato originated in the South American Andes, but its heartland of wild genetic diversity reaches from Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile across the Pampa and Chaco regions of Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and southern Brazil and northward into Central America, Mexico, and the southwestern United States. There are more than 200 wild potato species in this wide habitat that extends from high cold mountains and plateaus into warmer valleys and subtropical forests and drier semiarid intermontane basins and coastal valleys.

The greatest diversity in wild potato species occurs in the Lake Titicaca region of Peru and Bolivia, where the potato probably was domesticated between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago. Solanum tuberosum most likely was domesticated from the wild diploid species S. stenotomum, which then hybridized with S. sparsipilum or other wild species to form the amphidiploid S. tuberosum that evolved from the short-day northern Andean subspecies andigena, via additional crosses with wild species, into the subspecies tuberosum, which had a more southerly, longer-day distribution (Grun 1990; Hawkes 1990). Frost resistance and additional pest and disease resistance were introduced later via hybridizations with additional wild species, which allowed potatoes to be grown at altitudes up to 4,500 meters.

Answer 2

(Latin America)
(Solanum tuberosum -- Family Solanaceae)
Before 6000 BCE, the first wild potatoes were being collected from high plateaus that stretched between Cusco and Lake Titicaca in South America. Of the eight different species of potato in existence, it is known that the Andean farmers recognized as many as 5,000 different varieties. Some farmers today still grow up to forty-five different varieties in their tiny fields along the steep mountainsides. Typically for a staple food, there are more than 1,000 different names for the potato in the Quechua language alone.

These first tubers were small, misshapen, and knobbly, of many colours, and so bitter that special techniques were employed to make them edible. The truly amazing thing is that they even bothered to try! Through selection and inbreeding, that inedible tuber is now a vital staple food and has become the fourth most important world food crop after wheat, maize, and rice. Some potatoes can be found growing as high as 13,000 feet and, obviously, very resistant to frost. Others are better adapted to warmer and drier climates.

Answer 3

Most research says that Peru is the birthplace of the potato. From there it branched out. Potatoes were raised by native Americans in the United States' Southwest in particular New Mexico.

Answer 4

Idaho

Answer 5

Southwestern USA

Answer 6

They were brought over by the Irish people when they first came to this country from Ireland.

Answer 7

Im no rocket scientist or anything. But my guess is Idaho.

Answer 8

where ever anything grow wild? plants have their own mind and we as human claims things that we found, so who knows but the man up above............ask him first then a the public............................

Answer 9

idaho

Answer 10

they never did check this out,http://www.farminfo.org/garden/potato.htm