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Post by Carol Deppe on Nov 24, 2014 8:55:14 GMT -5
[/quote]I suppose I am technically skewing for small root systems and slower germination as well in my beans; simply because I have no other choice. [/quote]
I think you can prevent the selection for small root systems and slower germination by being aware of it and being attentive. The selection for small root systems or slower germination tends to happen and be automatic because we usually let transplants go too long until some are the right size and some are pot-bound. Or worse yet, all are pot-bound. Under these conditions the early germinating fast-growing plant with an aggressive root system will be the worst pot bound, and suffer the worst damage in transplanting and be the worst set back.
So just make sure you transplant before the vigorous fast plants get pot-bound. This will inevitably be before many of the transplants look full size. But that's OK. Just transplant before ANYONE gets overgrown or pot-bound.
There is another issue I noticed with respect to corn, but might well be general. Some corn varieties, including most Native American varieties, put out a substantial vigorous root system first, then send up a shoot later. You can really see this is you germinate some seeds on paper towels. The roots may be two or three inches long before the shoot even appears. Modern hybrid sweet corns, though, often germinate their shoot and root about equally in timing. Such seed will actually look like it is germinating faster, but you don't necessarily want to select for it. I prefer my corns to put down a vigorous root system first, then grow their shoot. It's the shoot that is vulnerable to being pulled up by birds or eaten by insects. If the corn puts down a vigorous root system, then the shoot emerges above the soil after the root is well established, in the first place it's harder for birds to pull up the seed by pulling on the shoot. In addition, much of the stored food in the seed is used up before the shoot even emerges, so there is less reward if a bird does manage to pull up the seed. In addition, the shoot, once it emerges, shoots up rapidly because of its well-established root and stays at the tiny most vulnerable stage only very briefly.
So this is another reason to not thin too early, as if you do you may be selecting for seeds that put more of their energy into making the shoot you see early on instead of establishing a vigorous root first. And if you are transplanting, this would be a reason not to simply select all the plants that germinate first.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Nov 24, 2014 8:36:31 GMT -5
There is something I don't quite understand though. Whey I try to plant, say sun flowers or squash while it is still cold they usually don't grow, but the ones that laid in the ground all winter do. What's up with that? Squash seeds have seed dormancy biochemistry associated with the goo we wash off when we clean the seeds. We wash the seed both to make the seed easier to handle and so that it will germinate when we want it to. The seed dormancy allows the seed to imbibe water in spring but not germinate. Microbial action breaks down the seed dormancy chemicals and the seed germinates. It takes some warmth to get enough microbial action to break down the inhibitors. With a little luck, by the time the inhibitors have been destroyed it is also warm enough for the squash seed to germinate. Of course, there might be a subsequent freeze (the reason we haven't planted our saved seed yet). In that case the germinated seed dies. However, there are probably lots more seeds in the ground whose nearby microbes hadn't yet destroyed their inhibitors, which will germinate a little later. Basically, some of that volunteer seed, assuming there is enough of it, will always manage to hit the warmth window just right and come up before you planted seed unless you too hit the warmth window just right, guessed perfectly the exact last frost, etc. I don't know about sunflower seeds. They have the advantage of being somewhat freeze resistant, though.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Nov 24, 2014 8:27:55 GMT -5
There is a lot of diversity within corn... I have been selecting my version of Astronomy Domine sweet corn for bright colors in the kernels in the early milk stage. When I first started growing it, many of those colors didn't show up until dough stage. There are some pericarp colors that get dark long before milk stage. Here's an example in the early milk stage. The purples, blues, and reds are just starting to develop and obscure the endosperm color. If I had waited a couple more days to pick they would have been much darker. Joseph--Tell me more about your 'Astronomy Domine' sweet corn. How/why you bred it, characteristics, etc. Or point me to a link where you talk about it.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Nov 24, 2014 8:09:24 GMT -5
For ears that are a solid color, like Roy's Calais, I've been selecting seed from about 75% red ears (but not dark red) and 25% yellow, which I read somewhere that was the best way to maintain the 2 colors. But in a variety like Cascade Ruby-Gold with a broad range of ear colors, do you select equal amounts of each color or still skew it one way or the other? My planting area is small and can only fit about 200 plants, so I've been saving seed each year and mixing batches from prior years to try to keep the diversity up as much as possible. I may need to give the sweet corn the boot and just grow one corn, that would give me room for another 360 plants. If the Cascade Ruby-Gold makes even a fair sweet corn, it would probably be better for maintaining the diversity of genetics in our limited space. Yup, you got that from me. It was in the context of the deep red color in Magic Manna. Usually, the deep red ears are smaller and the plants don't yield as well. So I used to plant basically the heterozygous reds, or at least, kernels from ears whose mothers were heterozygous red. I don't worry about it at this point. If you want more of some color, plant more of it. You don't necessarily see a simple obvious effect initially since maternal characteristics lag a generation in the patterns you get. However, if you want to keep all the colors and get maximum yield from every plant in a small planting, at least with respect to red, planting the kernels from the red (but not deep almost black-red) is still a good choice. And the same for brown. Whether the same pattern applies to Cascade Ruby-Gold deep red ears being smaller and yielding less I don't know yet. I've generally been planting, until recently, in ways that tend not to give many deep red ears. (Doing things like alternating rows of colored pericarp and gold (clear pericarp with deep yellow-orange flinty endosperm) in order to get deeper interior color for example.) Now I'm happy enough with interior color. It's not uniformly gold, but enough of it is. And fact is, I strongly prefer the flavor of the red and orange ears in cornbread. The yellow ears taste richer than commercial yellow meal, but it's the same flavor. And I simply don't much care for it. So I used the yellow ears for polenta and the reds and oranges for cornbread. (They all taste about the same as polenta. The powerfully different flavors associated with each color only pertain to cornbread.) So last year I had my grower plant just the orange and the red in two separate adjacent blocks. I figured I'd start the process of pulling out sister lines of orange and red, as they taste quite different in cornbread, so it would be nice to have the option of having them separate. This year, the two blocks gave pretty much the same range and proportions of colors with respect to orange and red. (Maternal phenotypes lag genotypes by a generation, so not too surprising.) However, I got a very much smaller proportion of yellow ears. What I'll be doing to maintain the colors is actually selecting pure color lines with parts of the patch (including, in the future, some gold, no pericarp color), and planting a general mix with part of the patch. It will all get mixed together it what I sell as CRG. But ultimately I hope their will be 2 sister lines of CRG, orange and red, in addition to CRG with all the colors.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Nov 21, 2014 19:40:57 GMT -5
The truth about pollination is that when plotted on a bell curve that it is an extremely local event. Joseph, you seem to have unusually little wind. At least during whatever part of the day and year your corn is releasing pollen. How local pollination is or isn't undoubtedly varies widely depending upon just whose corn patch and region we are talking about. Pollen release of my early corns is usually about 11 am or so. (In hotter drier places it is much earlier.) By then we always have a good stiff breeze whipping through. (I really notice because it interferes with garden photography.) If I pour out some threshed beans at this time, the chaff is carried an obvious 30 feet or more. When people till at that time of day on ground that is dry, the cloud of dust billows out for hundreds of feet (their topsoil blowing away). Corn pollen is much lighter than most of that visible dust or bean chaff. So, not surprisingly, pollination isn't so local in my corn patches. For example, when we planted an early white flint and a late yellow sweet, the pollination windows overlapped just a little. Yet this was enough so that even though we ate the four rows of flint closest to the sweet, the next four rows or so also had lots of contamination (multiple kernels on every ear). (We harvested them separately.) There were also occasional other contaminants on the rest of the ears. Enough so that had I not had screened them out, my 'Cascade Creamcap' flint would have taken a huge step backward toward mixed endosperm color instead of being pure for white. Pure white has a neutral flavor that is great with fine cheese, fish, smoked salmon, and for sandwich bread. Yellow corn tastes more like commercial corn, an OK flavor, but it doesn't go with everything. So a mixed endosperm type might be ok with some people, but I bred Cascade Creamcap for the particular flavor of white flint corn, and do not want the yellow in there.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Nov 21, 2014 19:10:08 GMT -5
Carol, I too loved what you said "There is only breeding." I don't think the majority of seed savers realize the potential power they are exercising when they make even basic selections. I was corresponding with someone the other day about how to thresh sorghum. The person was left with about 10% of kernels that weren't threshing free of their glumes. I told her that she had several options to deal with this, one of which was to use these seeds for planting stock instead of cleaning sufficiently for eating. But I warned her that this approach could inadvertently be selecting for sorghum that doesn't thresh easily. One of the dumb seed saving decisions I made early on was to select Ponca Butternuts for extra large necks and very small seed cavities. Eventually the variety didn't make seed and it was a dead end, the result of my pursuit of a narrow focus on yield over the plant's ability to reproduce successfully. Perhaps that's why I now like weedy/seedy crops more than I might have in the past. Exactly. The essential genetic method involved in seed saving is selection, and selection is actually much more complex than people often realize. For example, if I have a room full of ears of corn and choose the biggest for seed, I may actually be selecting for lateness. Often it's the later, bigger plant that produced those biggest ears. If you transplant a variety that has big vigorous roots, you not only are no longer selecting for ability to germinate and grow outdoors in real soil and weather, but you may also be selecting for slower germination or wimpy root systems. (The fast germinating seeds with big root systems are more likely to overgrow the pot or have their roots damaged in transplanting.) My corn, beans, and squash varieties are always direct seeded, and they germinate fast and have extremely aggressive roots. It's quite possible if you transplant that a variety that puts out a more restrained root system might be better for you. Full bush squash varieties normally don't even survive under my growing conditions because they have restricted bush root systems that don't get down to moist soil fast enough to survive on my regime of little or no watering in spring. But such varieties would undoubtedly have root systems more amenable to being potted and transplanted. I think a concept of whether the variety is to be direct seeded or transplanted needs to be a basic part of the definition of the variety. (All my corn, beans, and squash are designed for direct seeding.) If you do your thinning of corn or peas or beans before the plants are about 4 inches or so high, you are actually not selecting the best most vigorous genomes. I've seen plenty of chlorophylless mutants. The plants are yellow. They grow to 2" high just as fast as the rest. Then they come to an abrupt halt and cease all growth and die. This tells me that big-seeded varieties have enough food and biochemistry established by the mother that their own genes don't express enough to affect their performance until they are pretty big. So to select for vigor and rapid growth, I let the plants get to at least 4" high so they have had a while to show what they can do based upon their own genes. Only then do I thin. In that way I get powerful selection for vigor and growth rate just by thinning, which has to be done anyway. But it's all in exactly when and how you thin. I think the reason most squash varieties deteriorate so rapidly once the breeder releases them to the commercial trade is that the seed is collected by big machines rolling through the field. The fruits with big seed cavities (meaning thin flesh) are the ones with more seed. So commercial squash seed production selects for thin flesh, big seed cavities, and lots of seed. Likewise, more smaller seeds are selected for over fewer big seeds. If you save seed from all your squash without deliberately evaluating each fruit for flesh thickness, you too can select for thin flesh, large seed cavities, and small seed. :-)
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Post by Carol Deppe on Nov 21, 2014 18:41:25 GMT -5
Carol understands the empty kernel thing better than I do, but as far as I can tell it boils down to the sugary mutation doing different things to the different starches. Hard starch gets blocked from converting and so it stays sugary. Soft starch is more or less eliminated. So if you have a floury corn, which is pretty much ALL soft starch you win up with a kernel with the skin (aleurone and pericarp) the germ, and nothing else. While Carol never said this explicitly I suppose it also means that a sweetcorn derived from a flint corn will have bigger, fatter kernels than one derived from a dent of comparable kernel size, since there is less "stuff" removed. I also imagine that that would mean that the mutation in a glassy flint would yield EXCELLENT sweetcorn, since it's pretty much ALL hard starch In sweet corn, the conversion of sugar to hard starch is delayed, but apparently not actually blocked, because you end up with a kernel that has plenty of hard starch. And yes, you can get very fat sassy looking sweet kernels when sweet genes contaminate a flint variety. I'm speculating that a sweet corn variety that was a purer flint background (instead of the more typical dent background) might potentially have more vigorous germination and early growth and maybe better cold germination than most (dent-background) sweet corns. So I've tried more than once to breed from sweet contamination in flint varieties. To no avail. Usually there are multiple different genes for sweet in there (not just su but also sh), so I when I just pick out the sweet kernels and plant them in a patch, I get a mix of sweet and field, not pure sweet. I'm enough interested in the potential of a sweet with a pure flint background that this year I'm planning to make some deliberate crosses of flint corn and sweet corn and go from there and see what happens.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Nov 21, 2014 18:30:14 GMT -5
Carol Deppe, blueadzuki, Regarding your prior discussion on sweet corn crossing on flour you mention ending up with kernels that are basically empty shells. Is this because the sugar mutation (inhibiting the conversion of sugar to starch) is more pronounced on a flour kernel? Is soft flour endosperm more susceptible to this than hard flinty endosperm? It seems to me that su eliminates most, in some cases even all of the floury endosperm from the mature kernel while having little or no effect on the amount of flinty endosperm. In the F2 of crosses between pure floury varieties and sweet corn you usually get segregtion for different degrees of dentiness and and endosperm amounts, with some of the sweet kernels having very little endosperm at all. In crosses between flint varieties and sweet, in the F2 you see segregation for sweet and for endosperm type from more dentish to more flintish. And you don't see empty kernels.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Nov 20, 2014 0:53:26 GMT -5
There are degrees of open-pollinating depending on how you configure your patch. For example, suppose I plant a mustard, a Brassica juncea, as a seed crop. (juncea is self fertile and both self pollinates and outcrosses.) It would be most convenient to plant the mustard as one long row. But if I do that, most plants will be pollinated mostly by themselves or by the two plants adjacent, and a bit by the two plants one plant farther down, but very little by other plants in the patch. I would prefer to have each plant be pollinated by as many other plants as possible so that the genes all mix up more completely. So instead of planting in the more convenient (for us) single long row, we plant in a series of short rows so as to create a block. That way each plant is pollinated by more other plants than when just in a row.
Second, the spacing matters. Many of the trips the pollinators make are between flowers on the same plant rather than flowers on adjacent plants. Where the plants are self-fertile, these same-plant trips lead to inbreeding. I would prefer as many pollinator trips as possible to be between plants instead of between different flowers on one plant so as to minimize inbreeding. So I plant my seed crops with tight enough spacing so that adjacent plants overlap and the flowering scapes from adjacent plants will be intermingled. If I planted at much more generous distances, I'd end up with a higher proportion of pollinator trips being between flowers on the same plant, leading to more inbreeding.
So if I and someone else start with the same open pollinated variety and he puts his in generously spaced single rows, and I put mine in more tightly spaced blocks, after even one generation we will have seed that is different. Mine will be a much larger proportion of outcrossed seed, with outcrosses of many different plants represented. His will be mostly inbred seed, and the outcrosses will represent fewer parent combinations.
If the plants are self-incompatible, as Brassica oleracea varieties generally are, the configuration of the patch can actually affect seed yield, since self-pollinations don't result in seed.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Nov 20, 2014 0:28:24 GMT -5
People often think of open pollinated varieties as being finished and stable. Actually they aren't. In order to maintain an open pollinated variety you have to constantly select for the desired characteristics and rogue out off types. Mutations are quite common. Every individual plant is likely to have dozens of them. Most don't matter, but some do. Most new mutations move the plant in the direction of being more like wild plants and less desirable as food plants for people. So if you just save seed from all your plants or a random subset of them, your variety will actually deteriorate quite rapidly. One reason why many heirlooms don't measure up compared with hybrids is because the creators of the hybrids are putting their best breeding efforts into maintaining the inbreds that go into their hybrids. Meanwhile, often nobody is properly maintaining the op, and soon, it is just a name that is being sold associated with junk that no longer resembles the original heirloom at all.
There is really no such thing as "maintaining" a variety. There is only breeding. Either we breed to create something new with new characteristics. Or, if we like the characteristics in a variety, we must breed actively and select actively every generation in order to keep those characteristics.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Nov 20, 2014 0:19:15 GMT -5
These days we use the phrase "open pollinated variety" to tell people that this is not an F1 hybrid, that it is a pure variety, and that it will breed true as long as you don't grow it in such a way that it crosses with other varieties. This means you can save your own seed, assuming you know how.
If you plant the open-pollinated variety next to another variety of the species and let "open-pollination" happen and save the seed, however, you will not end up with more of your open pollinated variety. You have the open pollination, but you no longer have an open pollinated variety, because you no longer have a pure variety. Your seed will be a mix of pure seed of your starting variety and hybrids with the other varieties that were around. So, as Joseph in pointing out, "open pollination" isn't really necessarily all that open. It is a controlled pollination situation. Uncontrolled pollination within the variety is permitted but no pollination outside the variety. I'll add another couple of comments in separate posts.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Nov 16, 2014 11:03:35 GMT -5
Carol Deppe I tried a Navajo Orange Hubbard this year but it was taken out by the hail during the tornado. I don't know if it has the characteristic hard shell of the regular blue ones. I have not tried a Blue Hubbard, only because I thought they were for northern gardens. But if you think one would do well here, I will try it next year. So far the most rodent-resistant I've grown are Galeux d'Eysines (maxima)and Illinois (mixta). This year I had a few Violina Rugosa (moschata) make and the one I cooked was tasty. I also harvested some Cuares Mera and Gila Cliff Dweller (both mixta)that went unscathed. My guess is the prolific number of melons consumed by them were a decoy. So, between the hail/tornado/rodents this is all I harvested from over 100 plants! I've been thinking further about your rodent problems, flowerweaver. Seminole is a hard-shelled moschata. Most are fairly small, but Southern Exposure Seed Exchange lists the ordinary line and in addition a bigger line up to about 9 lbs. I happened to be reading something by Gary Nabhan, and he mentioned Seminole as doing well in hot places, and he is SW, not SE. So I'd suggest trying Seminole, including SESE's bigger line.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Nov 16, 2014 10:47:32 GMT -5
Reed, it looks like your "big red" ear that you are so nuts about is somewhere in between a parching corn and a popcorn. Whatever it is, it works for you. In a lot of my breeding projects, what motivated me to do the work was indeed that I went absolutely nuts over a particular flavor. The deep red pericarp ears are indeed spectacular in flavor when they are parching corn.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Nov 16, 2014 10:41:06 GMT -5
How about plant spacing affecting yields/cob size? I was just talking to a market grower near here about her Floriani Red Flint which made enormous, fat cobs this year, unlike last year. But what is the ideal spacing for a flint corn like Carol's Cascade Ruby-Gold, which I'm assuming is near the size of the Roy's Calais? I was thinking of planting in double rows 36" apart with the pathway spacing of 48" (the beds are 48" wide and the paths are 36", so planting in 6" from the edge of the bed would give this spacing). In the past I've spaced them equidistantly about 1' apart with 3 "rows" the length of the bed. If planting in the wide rows, I'm hoping that I can place a seed every 8"? That would give me the same number of plants per bed, just arranged differently. I usually aim for an average of 8" between plants and 3.5' between rows in our seed production field, but where two nice plants are only 6" apart, we leave them and just give them a little more space on the other side. The space between rows has more to do with what I've generally found convenient for working in the corn, not something I've tested rigorously. Generally, with more space you get more and bigger ears. A friend spaced some CRG at 6" with 30" between rows last year, and it was totally consistent since he transplanted. He got one-stalk plants with 1 ear per plant, with the grain bearing part of the ears up to about 8". (ie actual ear size larger.) That was under conditions of relatively low fertility. (He tilled under some poor untended sod and used no fertilizer.) So if you want as many plants represented as possible in a population of CRG, yes you can grow them as low as 6" apart. And I suspect you could get away with double rows 30 inches apart too. On the other hand, my grower of CRG in 2014 spaced the plants at 12" and got ear sizes up to 10 inches of grain on the ear, really beautiful big ears, usually 2/plant. Where there are gaps in a row, and a plant has 2' on both sides, CRG tends to make three full-size grain-bearing stalks and produce an ear or two on each. Fertility also affects things. One year we had a glorious winter cover crop of vetch and tilled that in and planted CRG at our ordinary spacing (which ends up being about 6 - 12" but averages about 8"). The CRG, which has been selected for ability to perform under conditions of relatively modest fertility, went totally nuts. Many plants had 3 or 4 stalks with one or two good size ears on every stalk.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Nov 16, 2014 10:19:53 GMT -5
I'm guessing a thinner ear is often preferred for a shorter drying time, Is that correct? Right. Here in maritime Oregon corn goes to apparent dryness in the field, but still requires a little finishing off indoors before it is safe from mold and dry enough to shell. But that is only if the overall thickness of the ears is modest. If the ear is fat it takes much more serious drying such as an actual drier with fan and heat rather than just putting the pile in front of a fan indoors and turning it a few times. New Englanders have the same problem, so much native American and heirloom New England corn is 8-row or at least fairly narrow cobbed. With Cascade Ruby-Gold, which varies from 8-12 rows, I've had a good chance to see how row number, ear thickness, and gaps between double rows (such as is typical of Roy's Calais) affects drydown. My prediction as I began developing Cascade Ruby-Gold was that with equal ear thickness, the ears with pairs of rows with big gaps should dry down faster. Wrong. They don't seem to. Likewise, I would have predicted that with equal ear thickness, the 8-row ears would dry down faster than the 12-row ears. Wrong again. They dry down the same. The only thing the ears seem to care about when it comes to drying down is how thick they are. Thicker ears always dry down slower than thinner ones.
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