As the calendar turns to a new year, I find myself getting excited about the 2024 growing season. At HZPC a new growing season means new varieties to share with you our potato growers. This year I have two new varieties that I can’t wait to tell you about.
Camelia is finally ready to be in your fields. This is the first spring where we’ll have it available at commercial volume for you our North American potato growers. Camelia has high resistance to disease and a high dormancy making it a great yellow storage potato — something that the market has been lacking. It has such a high dormancy that we had to reinvent our dormancy scale that we’ve used for 125 years.
Camelia is the first of our Even Greener varieties to be released in North America — this is something we’ve been working on in Europe for a number of years. These new more sustainable potato varieties are part of the next generation of varieties that HZPC are bringing to North America. These varieties have higher resistance to diseases such as PVY, Phytophthora, scab pressures, black leg — this helps limit the number of sprays needed for disease control. They also yield higher in challenging environmental conditions and are more resilient to the environmental changes we’ve seen as of late in our industry.
Another variety that has me excited is HZA 13-1486. It has a vibrant red skin and white flesh with a beautiful round tuber that yields great. To date it looks to store well. We’re in very early stages of testing but we think it could make a similar impact to the red/white market that our varieties Sifra and Whitney have made in the white market. We’re about two years away from having trial quantities available for it but we could possibly do tote quantities this year if you want to try it out. Keep your eyes open for 2025 though when we’ll have HZA 13-1486 available for trialing across North America.
While HZA 13-1486 may not be available yet commercially for the 2024 growing season, Camelia is. Make sure to reach out [email protected] or one of our dealers including Edmonton Potato Growers, Ebe Farms or Kroeker Farms to get some Camelia seed for your fields.
