Potato exhibition at Mihkli Farm Museum, Saaremaa island 28.09.2019

Tiia Trolla arranged a potato exhibition at Mihkli Farm Museum on Saaremaa island 28th September 2019. Old heritage potatoes were handed out to private persons first time spring 2018, when Väike-Maarja Farmers Association’s members cultivated them and arranged an exhibition of them. Spring 2019 was the second time when potatoes were handed out to a private person for cultivation. NGO Maadjas stresses the importance of in-situ cultivation of our heritage plants. If a plant has been saved for a very long time ex-situ, there is no insurance that it will perform as it used to do before. This is why we need to keep our genetic resources also in-situ, i.e. cultivated on fields, in different geographical locations in our countries. It is said that a plant that is taken from a gene bank to be cultivated on a field will take four years to get used to a new cultivation environment again. That is why one should not throw away a bad performing plant just after one year of cultivation but get on cultivating it to see if by time it will start to perform better.