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Post by jondear on Jan 14, 2015 22:13:09 GMT -5
I meant 50 ish cobs for the initial cross reed. I sure hope I can beg some land to use after that. I can only spare room for 200 to 300 plants in a garden of my size. One of my uncles has the room on his wild blueberry farm where I've been doing a lot of carpentry in the last few years. Last time we talked he said he was looking at tillers for the John Deere. The hayfield just takes up time to take care of. I'd be willing to help take care of an acre and grow all tgw veggies he can eat.
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Post by reed on Jan 14, 2015 22:36:15 GMT -5
Joseph and others here have lots more experience and knowledge than me but I think for diversity and eventual settling on a land race then the more fathers the better. I don't know if you are set on the ones you have for certain traits but if not I have at least twenty kinds of su and some se. More than enough to share a few kernels of each. If you are looking for something more specific from the start rather than a lanndrace it might be counterproductive. I'll be putting up a trade list soon so you can see the kinds.
Before I managed to borrow the spot across the road I was planning on maybe two hundred plants with three or four kinds for mothers and a few each of the others as fathers. I know what you mean about the stupid coons. My traps are out right now, trying to get ahead of them.
Hope it works out to get to use your uncles land.
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Post by steev on Jan 15, 2015 1:54:14 GMT -5
Well, if it's just him, I doubt he'd be able to eat what a well-worked acre could produce. That's really the difference between agribusiness and gardening; gardening just takes more planning, attention and labor, but it's much more productive.
Granted, here in the SF East Bay, things are easy, but I could have fed a family of three on 1/8 acre of usable yard.
I hope your uncle realizes that he has much to gain by letting you use that land.
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Post by jondear on Jan 16, 2015 21:27:55 GMT -5
Well I have him taking an interest in what I'm doing at least. He was really surprised by my potato plants from tps. He thought if I had used some 12-12-12 I'd have gotten bigger tubers though. He is probably right.
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Post by prairiegarden on Apr 28, 2015 23:19:20 GMT -5
Sorry if this is a really dumb question but I'm wondering.. just had a conversation with someone about saving seed either from hybrids or even worse a hybrid crossed with an open pollinated corn and he insisted that the cobs will be horrible, inedible if they aren't kept in isolation from each other or if seed is saved from a hybrid.
Now that makes no sense to me but it's such am entrenched belief that I am beginning to wonder when I read that it takes three years to get a happy and settled result, and up to 90 % of the first years plantings are not considered worth going on with.
What exactly does that mean? Does the corn taste bad? Does it not form cobs? Does it just mean that it didn't perform better enough so it's out of the running or does it mean that for some reason it's inedible? Every seed catalogue burbles on about how this sweet corn MUST be isolated and how hybrid seed cannot be used to save seed or unnamed horrors will occur, but what? If I throw 5 or 6 varieties in a field together what can I expect to have happen and how do I tell if a cob is going to be edible or awful?
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Post by DarJones on Apr 28, 2015 23:45:03 GMT -5
There is a lot that needs to be said to answer your question, but I will only attempt to cover part of it. If a hybrid is a really good flavored variety to start with, then it is very feasible to develop an open pollinated line from it that is also very good flavored. This generalization extends to most F1's in the plant kingdom. Hybrids are selected specifically because they provide significantly improved performance above the parents. Maize, is a bit of an exception in this area because the genetics are highly variable to start with. It is easy to demonstrate about 3% variability within the maize genome. This compares with .5 to 1.5 percent variability for most other cultivated crops. Because there is so much variability in the maize genome, it is highly probable that the parents in an F1 hybrid will have significant chunks of the genome that diverge between one of the inbred parents and the other. This can make dehybridizing an F1 a long term task. I am working on just such a project with a cross of Country Gentleman X Silver King with the objective of moving the se gene into an open pollinated shoepeg corn. I would like to retain at least 75% of the Country Gentleman genetics. From Silver King, I would like to recover se and a couple of disease tolerance genes. The task this year is to grow about 32 plants and self-pollinate each of them. As they mature to the milk stage, I will test each ear of corn to find out which demonstrate se+, Shoepeg, and general disease tolerance. With a bit of luck, I will be ready to do a backcross to Country Gentleman next year to saturate the open pollinated genetics into the selected line.
WRT tossing 5 or 6 varieties into a field, you will wind up with a composite breed that probably shows significant heterosis.
The only way to tell for sure if an ear of corn tastes good is to taste of it!
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Apr 29, 2015 0:08:46 GMT -5
The grand secret to plant breeding is that offspring tend to resemble their parents and grandparents. So if we start off with great parents, then the children are likely to be great as well. Most of the monster genes in our domesticated crops were eliminated millennia ago. We can find some of them by poking around in wild places... For example, one time I threw away a whole years worth of muskmelon seed because I harvested one bitter tasting melon.
I don't like the sweet corn and the popcorn to cross, because the sweet corn gets hard and not sweet, and the popcorn stops popping. Except that a couple years ago I crossed sweet corn and popcorn deliberately, because I wanted the sweet corn trait of early maturity to be transferred into my popcorn. So the children weren't good for anything but chicken food. Neither were the grandchildren. The great grandchildren have finally been separated into sweet corn, and into mostly popping corn. They should be good for something this year.
I think that I've never had an awful cob of corn, except for the time I tried harvesting some sweet corn about 3 weeks after the plants were partially killed by frost. That was nasty!!!! Sometimes I don't like the texture of a cob of corn, and sometimes the taste is a bit unexpected, but I'm pretty sure that awful doesn't describe any of the corn I've harvested. And I've mixed up hundreds of varieties...
So if you cross up 5 to 6 varieties in a field, you can expect among the children and grandchildren to find some that are just like the varieties that you started with, and some that are a blending of the traits of different varieties. That's about it... If you start with traditional stiff-stalk type corns with cylindrical cobs and kernels in rows then that's what the offspring will produce.
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Post by steev on Apr 29, 2015 0:43:41 GMT -5
So crop-breeding is like a sewer; what you get out depends on what you put in; sometimes it takes a while to know what you're getting out, but one way or another, it's always good shit.
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Post by DarJones on Apr 29, 2015 8:17:31 GMT -5
or maybe it is shinola!
I should probably explain this since a lot of readers won't have the cultural background to make sense of it. There is a saying popular in some parts of the U.S. to describe an extremely dumb and aggravating person. "He/she doesn't know shit from shinola". Shinola was a brand of shoe polish. The comparison therefore is someone who does not know shit from shoe polish.
From Mike Leathers: "Flim-flam and cow manure both smell sweet at first, but the manure will make your soil richer. "
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Post by steev on Apr 29, 2015 10:17:27 GMT -5
That alliterative form of the folk-saying became popular around the 1940's, prior to which it had been "from apple butter", which my Grandad used, which was a common saying from the 1850's.
Nowadays, many people know neither Shinola nor apple butter.
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Post by jondear on Apr 29, 2015 11:18:01 GMT -5
'I know the difference 'tween shit and shinola' is also a line from Lynyrd Skynyrds song "Sweet Mama". Which incidentally is the basis for my maxima squash breeding project. Shinola might make a great variety name
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Post by oldmobie on Apr 29, 2015 13:00:57 GMT -5
Sorry if this is a really dumb question but I'm wondering.. just had a conversation with someone about saving seed either from hybrids or even worse a hybrid crossed with an open pollinated corn and he insisted that the cobs will be horrible, inedible if they aren't kept in isolation from each other or if seed is saved from a hybrid. Now that makes no sense to me but it's such am entrenched belief that I am beginning to wonder when I read that it takes three years to get a happy and settled result, and up to 90 % of the first years plantings are not considered worth going on with. What exactly does that mean? Does the corn taste bad? Does it not form cobs? Does it just mean that it didn't perform better enough so it's out of the running or does it mean that for some reason it's inedible? Every seed catalogue burbles on about how this sweet corn MUST be isolated and how hybrid seed cannot be used to save seed or unnamed horrors will occur, but what? If I throw 5 or 6 varieties in a field together what can I expect to have happen and how do I tell if a cob is going to be edible or awful? My experience with saving my own corn seed doesn't equal that of Joseph Lofthouse or DarJones, but I've done so for about two years now. I'm pleased with the results so far. Last year, the seeds I had saved previously out-performed all the seeds I got in trade. I think they've already started to adapt to my garden. As for the warnings you get, I think a little bit of truth is diluted into a lot of myth: Myth says the seed corporation's seeds will produce a good crop, your saved seeds will fail. They can save seeds properly, but you can't. Truth is, they have the resources to produce seed that meets their goals, and you might not. They have the land to grow lots and lots of the same seed in isolation from other pollen. This lets them highly inbreed the crop, so that every plant matures at once, and can be easily harvested by machine. They can maximize production by perfect weeding, watering, fertilizer and insecticide application, etc. I can't replicate that. Most of us can't. What I can do, and so can you, is adapt my crops to the conditions in my garden. Little to no chemical input, a gardener who'd rather apply mulch than till or weed, watering that may have to await my convenience. Already, my corn is less inbred. It doesn't all ripen at once. For me, this means more days spent eating just picked corn, and less chance of a huge glut to have to preserve. My saved seeds don't fit the corporation's goals, but they're starting to fit mine. The myth says the corporation is Moses, come to lead us to prosperity with patented seeds from the finger of God. It just ain't so. Consider your goals. If they're like the corporation's, maybe you need their seeds. If you have your own goals, you just need good seeds (no matter where they're from), diversity, and careful selection.
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Apr 29, 2015 13:31:32 GMT -5
oldmobie: That rant earned you this month's gold star! Oh my heck I was giggling when I read it.
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Post by blueadzuki on Apr 29, 2015 14:11:22 GMT -5
'I know the difference 'tween shit and shinola' is also a line from Lynyrd Skynyrds song "Sweet Mama". Which incidentally is the basis for my maxima squash breeding project. Shinola might make a great variety name Garrison Kiellor also had a comedy riff on it, a fake public service announcement from the Shinola corporation explaining that the had moved from the shoe polish industry to the fertilizer industry, and were pointing this out to those people who were still trying to use their product to shine their shoes. I think the oldest form is the British version, "To know chalk from cheese"
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Post by jondear on Apr 29, 2015 19:38:34 GMT -5
oldmobie: That rant earned you this month's gold star! Oh my heck I was giggling when I read it. Lol... a gold star indeed.
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