Valiant Gardeners,
A new and strange mystery has appeared among the plants: The Baked Potato !
Once a completely ordinary purple potato plant, when Shelybear let it out of her sight, it somehow, well, got cooked. Or rather, baked. How did that happen ?! A delicious little secret that many a connoisseur would like to know.
So let us start a quest to find it !
Theory I:
The Baked Potato is just another variant of the potato tubers you can find in the wild garden.
Current Knowledge: Shelybear did an experiment with parentless potatoes (her Experiment #4). Out of 87 tubers only the mysterious one became a Baked Potato.
So just picking up a tuber from the wild garden probably isn't it.
Theory II:
The Baked Potato is a breed-only variant.
Current Knowledge: EmeraldsLyn started a collection of bred potatoes. Out of 21 specimens none became Baked (the other three variants were obtained, though), then the collection was closed.
This doesn't look like a very promising angle, but it might bear further investigation (21 samples isn't that much, after all).
Theory III:
The Baked Potato behaves similar to the Biting Dandelion: You either get it very rarely by breeding, or after growing a certain number of potatoes your next potato plant spontaneously turns into a Baked Potato.
Current Knowledge: Let's see how many potatoes people have grown so far. If the maximum is too high (and didn't summon a spontaneous mutation of an existing plant) we probably could rule this one out as well.
Edit: With as many as 36 in one garden and no baking so far this doesn't look very promising either...
Theory IV:
It has something to do with gifting/trading the plant in question.
Current Knowledge: Well, the Mysterious Baked Potato did change owners repeatedly. And as far as I understood even changed appearances while doing so. Perhaps the people involved could summarise its journey and forms ?
Trading/gifting grown potato plants sounds like a promising next step.
Theory V+:
Freak accident ? Something else entirely ? You tell me. 
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What to do
If you want to help in our quest to solve the riddle, do this:
- First of all: if you manage to get hold of a Baked Potato let us know (and preferably let us know how you did it) !!!
- Is there a thread going that does a "breed-only" collection for potatoes ? If so, let me know. If not: Post your bred potatoes here with the annotation "Bred Potato" to mark them and the BBCode so I can add them more easily.
- How many potatoes have you raised in your garden (raised by youself, not gotten as a mature plant from elsewhere) without getting a Baked Potato ? Tell me and mark it with "Theory III" (or "Theory 3" if you don't like Roman numbers ).
- When you trade or gift grown potatoes (and it would help if you did that), post it here, using the following form:
Old Owner: name of the person the plant came from
Grown or Received: write "grown" if you were the one who grew the plant from its tuber, write "received" if you got it when it was already fully grown
Old Variant: variant of potato the plant was before it was traded/gifted away and the BBCode
New Owner: name of the person that got the plant
New Variant: variant of potato the plant was after it was traded/gifted away and the BBCode
And here once more for copy/pasting:
Old Owner:
Grown or Received:
Old Variant:
New Owner:
New Variant:
[size=12]If you have any more, or better, ideas how to go about this - speak up and we'll listen !
I'll try to keep this up to date, but I'm not sure how much time I will have to do that.
[size=12]So - onwards, valiant gardeners, to solve the mystery of the Baked Potato !
