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Post by Carol Deppe on Oct 15, 2014 13:53:52 GMT -5
Re the bitter gene problem. I have not ever had a problem with it, so I asked Jim Myers, the vegetable breeder at Oregon State University about it. He says it's a dominant in the pepos that can come in from gourds. It's not a problem with the other species because we don't grow wild or bitter-carrying versions of those.
While the bitterness gene is dominant, you can't taste it until you have fruit, and the plant has been busy contributing pollen to the rest of the patch for a while before you have fruit. And in winter squash, since you don't taste those until after the season, if you caught a bitter plant it would have been spreading that gene throughout your patch all season. So even on a home scale it's not necessarily easy to get rid of the bitter gene. Joseph's method of tasting every fruit, culling all off-type plants, then removing all preexisting fruits is just what it would take to do the job. But in commercial seed production fields I think usually nobody tastes fruit from each plant at all, let alone at a stage where the situation is still retrievable. That is part of why it is so easy to breed better squashes than most of what we can buy.
I'm a big fan of freezing some seed of every variety you care about (after proper extra drying if necessary). When you do that you can be sloppier about isolation distances and numbers (at least when growing the seed just for yourself), as you can always go back to the freezer if your material gets screwed up.
Suzanne Ashworth's book Seed to Seed is NOT using info from the Oregon seed industry. Actually, she used pretty much the same sources I did when I wrote the "800 interesting plants" table in Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties where I give isolation distances, breeding systems, incompatibility systems, and other info for most garden and many other crops. I give the references for every isolation distance, and they are from the professional literature representing mostly university breeders' information worldwide. I've talked with Suzanne Ashworth about it, and she used those same references, and actually included them in the original draft of her book. But Seed Saver's Exchange, the publisher, made her omit the references, saying it made the book too technical.
The isolation distances in Seed to Seed and in the table in Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties are not overestimates or for producing foundation seed. They are, however, intended for general use in producing standard-grade seed to sell. They are actually in some ways underestimates. Universities have mostly been practicing chemical agriculture for decades, and many of them have fields that have few pollinators compared with what we experience if we grow vegetables on long-time organic soils near untilled meadows, woods, and wetlands.
There are all kinds of tricks you can use to cheat at those isolation distances, however. For starters, you don't need isolation good enough for anywhere in the world, just for your garden. And in some regions some crops cross readily and not in other regions. Common beans cross so readily here in my (organic) garden near a long-time wetland that if I want a cross I just interplant the two varieties. Every plant will produce some crossed seed. But common beans may virtually never cross in some regions. And much has to do with your intentions. Are you selling seed or just keeping it for yourself? Do you have some tucked away in the freezer as a backup? Are you growing a big field of something? In that case, you can get a good bit of isolation just saving seed from the middle; that may be good enough isolation even if your neighbors are growing the crop. (Peasants and Indians usually grew big enough patches of grain so that most came from the center part of the patch instead of the edges, so was "self-isolated." Many of the problems we have with isolation are because we are growing a few plants instead of whole fields of them.) Also, how large is the nearest patch? I don't usually worry about a potentially contaminating corn crop 1/4 mile away if it is just a garden patch, even for the crops I sell. I'd just save the seed from the middle of my patch (1/2 acre or more) and eat the edges. But if the potentially contaminating crop was a planting of hundreds of acres, that would be too much contamination for a crop I intended to sell. (But I probably still wouldn't worry about it if it was a crop just for my own use where I had frozen backup seed.) Also, some areas, there is a prevailing wind during the season and time of day when the corn pollinates, and all contamination is directional. You can plant two corns side by side, and only the down-wind one will experience crosses. In other fields (even in the same region) the wind varies enough so that you get crosses in both directions. If you have a consistent wind pattern, you may need to care only about other corns that are upwind. (If you have such consistent wind patterns, the ears on one edge of the patch will be nearly completely or completely unfilled.) I also get around many problems by focusing on corns that are so early that only Painted Mountain or very early sweet corn is pollinating in the same window.
The number of plants recommended in Seed to Seed is unavoidably arbitrary. If you are trying to maintain all the diversity in a very diverse corn, it will take growing many hundreds of plants, not the one or two hundred adequate for a corn with more ordinary amounts of genetic heterogeneity. But many heirloom varieties have already been genetically bottlenecked so much that there is little genetic heterogeneity left to lose. Where the variety is performing adequately anyway, it's because the combination of genes it has gives adequate performance even when inbred. Many big viney heirloom squash varieties have probably passed through multiple bottleneckings of a single plant or two. So while the squash are basically outbreeders, we have grown them to turn many of them into being fairly tolerant of inbreeding. If I'm growing squash for just my own use, I just freeze some seed, then grow whatever I need for eating purposes and hand-pollinate a few plants of those. If the material deteriorates I go back to the frozen stash and try again, taking more care about the numbers. If I'm growing seed to sell, and have bred the squash myself and deliberately created vigor-enhancing heterogeneity (such as with 'Candystick Dessert Delicata'), I grow the variety as the only variety of the species on an isolated farm, and grow at least about 80 plants. In this case, it's not just that I'm selling seed, it's that I'm the ultimate source for the seed for other seedsmen and seed companies. That gives you some idea of the range of legitimate choices--all the way from "whatever is handy" to serious numbers depending upon the situation.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Oct 15, 2014 12:28:56 GMT -5
Oxbowfarm--Yes, I think calling pellagra a social problem makes a good sense. We can actually make all the niacin we need from one of the amino acids in meat or fish or other animal products. So for starters, pellagra is a non issue unless you eat no meat and animal products. In addition, niacin is, as you mentioned, abundant in greens and green veggies. So it really is an issue only for those who are eating only corn, and no meat or greens. Gardeners usually have plenty of greens and other things.
Only some American Indians nixtamalized corn. The practice seems mostly associated with the Southwest and Mexico. Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden describes in detail all the crops and varieties grown by the Hidatsa and Mandan Indians and how they were prepared. They clearly didn't nixtamalize. Pellagra does not seem to have been an issue for Indians whether they nixtamalized or not. Most Indians hunted as well as grew corn. In fact, among many the gardening was women's work, and the men focused entirely on hunting (and defense/warfare).
Nixtamalizing can also make the calcium in corn more bioavailable, however, or even add lots more calcium when the alkali used has calcium in it. That may have actually mattered more for most Indians who nixtamalized corn than the niacin issue.
Joseph--Some field corns stay sweet and tender longer than others. So some are better for eating at the green stage than others. Many dents and flour corns are very sweet in the sweet stage and stay in that stage (with no more grittiness than prime sweet corn) for long enough to use that way. But not all. Also, if the flour corn is short on water it may go through the green stage so fast it's unusable that way, even if it's a good green-ear corn with more water.
Any good parching corn is also a good general purpose flour corn. It can be used for the basic wet-batter cornbread or nixtamalized, like all corns. But flour corns can also be used to make pancakes, cakes, cookies, crackers, or gravy. I especially like flour corns for pancakes, angle food cake, and brown gravy. I'm gluten intolerant, and the flour corns grind up so fine they are like wheat flour. And white flour corns, fixed like pancakes, actually have a nice pancakey flavor. (I use the white ears from Magic Manna, but Tuscarora and other white flour corns have virtually the same pancakey flavor when fixed like pancakes.)
That ear that gave kernels that blew up like puffed rice sounds fantastic. I hope you relent and plant it out.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Oct 15, 2014 11:18:59 GMT -5
Reed-- With respect to the ear on the left--For starters it is carrying the chinmark pattern. (I usually call this blaze or starfire.) Since that expresses in the pericarp, which is made by the mother plant, every kernel in the ear expresses it, more or less. (Chinmark shows both variable penetrance and variable expressivity. That's genetics-speak for saying that it shows up to various extents from kernel to kernel when it is present, and sometimes may not show up at all even though present.) The ear is also segregating for at least two genes that control aleurone color--black and red-aleurone. The basic black color is modified to red by the red-aleurone gene. The ear is also segregating for yellow versus white color of flinty endosperm. (It's possible that the ear was pollinated by something carrying the aleurone and/or yellow endosperm genes rather than actually carrying them itself.) It's hard to tell flint versus flour type from a photo, but my guess is that this is too flinty to use as a flour or parching corn, and too floury to make good polenta. It could be made into a wet-batter cornbread. Or could be nixtamalized and made into tortillas, etc.
Ear number 2 appears to have a clear pericarp. It's segregating for black aleurone and the red-aleurone modifier of black. I think the mother plant had a white endosperm, and this ear got pollinated by one or more plants with some yellow endosperm. So there are occasional yellow-endosperm kernels. (Not very many. Not enough to represent the mother plant being heterozygous for yellow. Yellow under the black may be invisible. But yellow under red-endosperm gives you a brown shades. I'm not seeing enough yellow plus brown to think the mother plant was heterozygous for yellow flint. So I think she was heterozygous for black and for red-aleurone, and was homozygous for white flint, and had mostly white flint neighbors, with at least one yellow flint neighbor. As with the other ear, I suspect the the ear isn't a pure enough type to use as a true flour or true flint corn, and the best use would be as a wet batter cornbread, or nixtamalized. (You can do those with any type of corn.)
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Post by Carol Deppe on Oct 10, 2014 1:54:19 GMT -5
I'd just go ahead and try it. Glass Gem may have so much genetic heterogeneity in it that even if you lose most of it by saving seed from the one ear, there may be enough genetic heterogeneity remaining to have a workable line. And that corn plant that performed well for you may have genes that particularly matter to you, which may matter more than greater genetic heterogeneity.
On the other hand, Glass Gem may have already been so highly selected for kernel type (other than color) that it has already lost pretty much all its genetic heterogeneity, in which case, you might not be hurting things much by saving ears from just one cob. I haven't grown GG, but nobody seems to be talking about how well it yields compared with most corns. Maybe there isn't much heterogeneity left to lose.
If you start with an optimally maintained op variety with lots of genetic heterogeneity, you can usually best keep the yield up by maintaining that genetic heterogeneity. But that may or may not be the situation with respect to Glass Gem as it exists now. And optimal yield isn't the issue. The issue is, if you start a line from this one ear, can you get a line that yields well enough so that you consider it worthwhile growing it?
Try it and see. I would just plant out the kernels, not cross them with anything. You like the beauty and culinary characteristics of what you have, and outcrosses are likely to mess that up. You might decide you need to outcross because the plants won't yield enough, but give them a chance to tell you what they think about the situation.
The problem with inbreeding in corn is that it usually gives you lower yield, weaker smaller plants, smaller ears, etc. If you inbreed in most heterogeneous corn material, the more rounds of inbreeding, the worse the yield, etc. Some highly inbred lines yield better than others, though. Rowan mentions inbreeding a wax corn generation after generation with no signs of inbreeding depression kicking in. I think that line was probably so highly inbred before he got it that inbreeding further isn't changing anything. But this wax line happens to be a line that yields decently as an inbred.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Oct 10, 2014 1:09:08 GMT -5
On isolating corn varieties by maturity times:
University information on the subject usually relates to strains or hybrids that are highly uniform and have highly synchronous pollen shed. It just doesn't apply to most op varieties.
In addition, corns maturity dates are usually listed as to the first ears. For many op corns, the harvest extends a month or more. So a "70 day" corn is really a "70 to 100 day" corn, and will probably overlap in pollination windows with a "90 day" corn. Most native American corns tassel out and shed pollen very nonsynchronously and over a very long period, a month or more usually.
My experience here in Willamette Valley Oregon, in spite of our huge frost free growing period, two timing-based isolation niches per season is the best I can do. Three may sometimes be possible, but takes luck and vigilance and extra work (such as getting out there and detasselling all late tassels off one variety as the first silks on show up on the other), and just can't be counted on. (The varieties will have better or worse soil fertility and other conditions, which can affect the speed of development enough so that one whole patch has to be eliminated after all the work of planting and growing it in order to save the others.) Even with just two crops, I also practice additional tricks. So, for example, I might plant a very early white flint and a very late yellow sweet corn. And use the rows where they come together as food. Then inspect the ears. With this combination, any crosses of the yellow sweet onto the white flint show up as obvious yellow kernels. And any crosses of the flint onto the sweet show up as obvious field type kernels in the background of wrinkled-kernel ears. Even so, there is enough overlap so that I also prefer to plant the late corn a couple of weeks later than the early corn. And it is important that the early corn does not go on better soil or get better fertilized than the late corn.
I plant only the combination of an early and a late. If I plant a midseason corn, I can't plant anything else. For this reason, among others, I'm much more interested in early corns and late corns and not particularly interested in midseason corns. And the late corns have to be ones that can be harvested after the rainy season starts, varieties that don't mold easily.
If I can't recognize crosses of the late corn onto the early corn, I can get around the problem by just saving seed from the biggest ears of the early corn. These will usually be the first ears on each plant, which are almost certain to have been pollinated before there was any overlap with the late variety. If there are crosses, they will be in the second or later ears. That also selects automatically for earliness in the early variety by makes it impossible to select for total yield in the early variety (which is what you get automatically when you save seed from all the ears).
If I can't recognize crosses of the early corn onto the late corn, I can get around that by walking the early rows and removing any late tassels before the silks on the later corn emerge. But that's work. And plenty of times it just doesn't get noticed and done at the right time. I prefer to set things up where I can recognize the crosses in at least one direction if not both as the backup plan whenever I isolate two corn varieties by maturity times rather than depending upon detasseling-assisted isolation.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Oct 9, 2014 0:48:55 GMT -5
blackox, thanks for the welcome! I actually joined the forum more than a year ago, but had such a crappy computer that reading anything online was torture. And I was consumed with the new book. Now I have a computer that is actually a joy to use, and the book is turned in and in production. So I came up for air and looked around...
jondear, 'Sweet Mama' is the name of a proprietary commercial F1 hybrid. So if you have grown out an F2 and an F3 of that material, those are a breeding project of your own. But they aren't 'Sweet Mama' any more, even if no other genes are introduced, such as from Burgess Buttercup. 'Sweet Mama' is nice and early, vigorous, and high yielding, so it's a good choice to breed from on those grounds. But the flesh isn't as sweet, intensely flavorful, or fine-grained as the best op squash such as Burgess. Burgess Buttercup is unsurpassed for flavor but isn't as early, productive, or vigorous as Sweet Mama hybrid. So if you have allowed crossing between the 'Sweet Mama' breeding material and Burgess, that's a nice choice. You can pick up earliness and vigor from the 'Sweet Mama' and better quality--better flavor, drier flesh, and finer texture from the Burgess. If I were doing it I probably would have just crossed 'Sweet Mama' hybrid to the Burgess, then discarded the semibushes in the next generation and just mass selected from there, that is, keeping seed from the best-quality/flavored fruits from the most productive plants each (open-pollinated) generation thereafter. (I prefer full vines to bushes or half bushes.) You might have got to about the same place a bit less directly.
If I were doing it I would not add additional material unless there is some particular reason. Very few squash are as high quality as Burgess or as vigorous and early and high yielding as Sweet Mama. One reason might be you want more colors than just the green. If so, I'd suggest mixing in some Sunshine F1. (5 lbs and orange-red) It's actually the only hybrid max I know of whose quality is as good as the best op max varieties. And it's as vigorous and productive as Sweet Mama. And it's a comparable size to the other squash you are using.
The more different squash you use, the more likely you are to generate genetic combinations that are inferior in quality and flavor to what you started with. So whether you are after a new pure variety or a landrace, when you are after top culinary quality I think there is often much to be said for using just two or three varieties as parents. It's easier to get/keep uniformity for top culinary quality that way.
If you'd like to walk on the wild side, though, I would suggest mixing in some '(Dutch/Flat) White Boer'. It's the only high quality white maxima squash I know of. It's delicious but decidedly moist. It runs up to about 30 lbs and has a very flattened Kabocha shape with very thick flesh and a ridiculously tiny seed cavity. But it is moist, and does not store well. It would be nice to have lots more good culinary quality white squash. It would be nice to have a high quality culinary white variety that was drier and stored better. And/or smaller. The flavor of the White Boer is also quite different from most other maximas. Buttercup, Sweet Mama, Sunshine, Sweet Meat, and many others all belong to one basic flavor class, though they differ in quality, sweetness, intensity of flavor, etc. But White Boer is an entirely different flavor class, and it's the only squash I know of with that distinct flavor. It would be nice to have other squash with that different flavor.
It really depends upon what you are after. Do you want every size or a particular (approximate) size? Do you want a uniform color or a mix of colors? Do you want just vines, or just bushes or a mix? (Homozygous bush varieties seem never to develop the full sweetness of vine or half-bush types, however. Which is why I go for vines.)
One characteristic I care a lot about is keeping ability. If a maxima squash can't store till spring, I it doesn't make the cut.
I also care a lot about thickness of flesh. A squash with thicker flesh can have 3 times as much food or more as one with more typical flesh thickness, but takes no more space to grow or store. When I mass select I save seed only from the fruits with the thicker flesh.
You can evaluate the flavor and quality of the fruit when it is raw, incidentally, and learn to correlate that with what it will taste like cooked. That way you can check the flavor and quality of every fruit before you bother saving its seed.
Seed you grow out from an F1 hybrid is different from the F2 seed you keep out of the hybrid for the following reason. Let's suppose the F1 hybrid has as parents secret variety A and secret variety B, both themselves purebreeding varieties, and is made in the direction of using variety A as the female parent and B as the male/pollen parent. The seed of that cross, the F1 seed, is made on variety A, and generally looks like seed of variety A. But the F1 hybrid between A and B is genetically different from A, so those F1 plants produce whatever seed type is indicated by their own genes.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Oct 8, 2014 20:25:56 GMT -5
'Hannan Popbean' is a variety I bred myself from USDA landrace material from Morocco. It is NOT that material from Morocco. That landrace stuff was all over the map with maturity times varying from early July to so late it was just thinking about starting to flower in October. All the later plants needed irrigation. Seed sizes from tiny to fairly big. Seed #/pod from 1 to 4. Plant size from 3 inches to 3'. Plant form from a ground hugging vine to quite erect. Very resistant to soil diseases. Some plants resistant to the many aphid carried legume diseases, but more than half badly affected and many actually died before yielding anything. 'Hannan Popbean', planted in March in Willamette Valley Oregon, matures in late July and needs no irrigation. The plants are about 2' high. Most pods on most plants contain one big seed. It's black and brown mottled, as is the USDA material. But it is also resistant to every aphid-borne legume disease Willamette Valley Oregon, a hotbed of such diseases, can throw at it. And it is still of course highly resistant to soil borne diseases. I sell it through my seed company Fertile Valley Seeds. To see or download or sign up to receive my the seed list see www.caroldeppe.com.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Oct 8, 2014 20:01:18 GMT -5
Those of us I know who make any money breeding and releasing new open-pollinated public domain varieties are doing it mostly in combination with something else related. Most commonly, we run small seed companies and/or are seed growers (selling seed to retail seed companies) along with our breeding work. It is actually our seed growing we are getting paid for. However, the fact that we have lists that include unique varieties we bred ourselves helps attract interest and customers. It makes us the premiere source for those varieties. In addition, some retail seed companies are willing to pay a voluntary royalty on the seed if they pick up and grow your variety themselves, which also helps. And if you are a small seed-company/breeder, customers who care about public domain varieties often make donations to help support your work, which also helps. Selling vegetables for market, selling vegetable starts, running a CSA, or owning a nursery could also combine well with breeding. In my case, I first wrote about gardening, including plant breeding, which also worked. Now that I have been breeding long enough to have a number of my own varieties, I also run a small seed company. So basically I sell seeds and information directly and plant breeding mostly indirectly.
My major not very helpful advice with respect to making money at freelance plant breeding is to start 20 years ago. For the first decade or two you just aren't releasing new stuff of your own. Then once you get 20 years in, you can have enough projects at different stages so you are releasing at least one or two new varieties every year. I'm at that point now. But it sure took a while.
I think of breeding new open-pollinated public domain varieties mainly as a public service. It does not monetize very well. Many valuable activities that make a serious contribution to society do not monetize very well. If you love doing plant breeding and are driven to do it, you do it. If you can figure out some way to combine it with something related you can get paid for so as to get paid at least indirectly for the plant breeding, fine. If not, you have an ordinary job and breed plants on the side.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Oct 8, 2014 19:01:21 GMT -5
The hairy mustard succumbed to a move and a change in situations and interests. It had a bland flavor, and at the time I much preferred the richer flavor of cooked 'Green Wave'. (I better appreciate all the flavors of greens now, including the bland ones. This was 20 years back.) Where I moved to, deer, not slugs, were the issue. So I started growing and breeding with 'Green Wave'. And a duck flock dealt with the slugs as well as other pests. The pea succumbed to practical realities and greater information. By the time I had tried overwintering enough different varieties, I basically figured out that any medium height or tall pea that grows fast in winter will do pretty well at getting up above the most slug-vulnerable line and outrunning the slugs as long as this is Willamette Valley garden slugs we're talking about (not banana slugs), and there are not too many. I ended up deciding that I had mostly just reinvented the tall type of pea. Then, with further experience, I lost interest in tall peas. Oregon Sugar Pod II and Oregon Giant Sugar, both Jim Baggett/Oregon State varieties that are medium (up to about 3') in height do about as well at outrunning slugs as my "special" variety did. And it didn't help when I figured out that pole varieties of peas actually don't yield more than the best of the medium vine varieties. They don't necessarily have more leaf surface or more pods or bigger pods or better flavor compared with these elite medium-vine types such as the two mentioned OSU varieties. The pole types simply have much longer internodes so take much more serious support so are much more work for the amount of food. I can support a small patch of the medium-vine types with just a tomato support ring. Basically, I quit growing tall peas, including my own. What it amounted to is that I ended up deciding that what I had bred did not measure up to what was already available. Those two OSU varieties are also resistant to pea enation, pea wilt, and powdery mildew, with the result that they can be planted in the mild maritime NW from spring to August for crops from early summer through fall. And both will overwinter from a mid-October planting. For a number of years I tried alternate ways to produce something similar to 'Sandwich-slice" squash that would be easier to breed into a stable variety, but it didn't work. So after a long intermission I've gone back to that seed and have started working with it again. It segregates all sorts of stuff, so it's going to take a while. I developed celiac disease (now inactive, since I eat no wheat), which refocused my breeding interest just as I was writing Breed Your Own. Long before I knew what the problem was my breeding interests turned very strongly in the direction of corn, squash, and beans, the crops that gave me the ability to produce my own staples instead of depending upon commercial staples that include wheat as a major or minor or cross contaminating ingredient in almost everything. Among the varieties I've released are the corns 'Cascade Ruby-Gold Flint', 'Cascade Creamcap Flint', 'Magic Manna Flour', the reselected (maxima) squash line 'Sweet Meat--Oregon Homestead', the pepo 'Candystick Dessert Delicata', 'Hannan Popbean' (a garbanzo), 'Fast Lady Northern Southern Pea' (a cowpea), and a reselection of 'Gaucho' (an Argentine heirloom). I'm especially proud of the 'Candystick.' It is bigger and has thicker flesh than any other delicata. As a consequence the average fruit actually has about four times as much food or more than other delicata varieties. It's also more vigorous, more productive, and I think, tastes better. It has a flavor reminescent of a Medjool date. You can see or download my seedlist at my website www.caroldeppe.com. But be aware that I operate as a seed company (Fertile Valley Seeds) only seasonally (late winter and spring), and do not ship seeds the rest of the year. The rest of the time I'm plant breeding, doing garden research, growing seeds, or writing books. Various of my released varieties are also sold by Nichols, Adaptive Seeds, Bountiful Gardens, and Southern Exposure. All these good folks either buy from me wholesale or pay a friendly voluntary royalty to help support my work, so I'm happy to have them selling seed of my varieties. I have a new book coming out soon, The Tao of Vegetable Gardening: Cultivating Tomatoes, Greens, Peas, Beans, Squash, Joy, and Serenity. Among other things, it has a last chapter that includes sections on the Do-It-Yourself seed bank, breeding landraces, dehybridizing (tomato) hybrids, breeding varieties adapted to organic growing conditions, general tomato genetics, and breeding tomatoes for resistance to late blight and other diseases. I focused so much on tomato breeding because I think the more virulent lines of late blight now spreading worldwide and the escape of both mating types of the disease mean that we are going to become unable to grow all or nearly all of the heirloom tomatoes we so cherish in the next decade or so. And University and commercial breeders are focusing on commercial varieties and mostly releasing them just as hybrids. If we want tomatoes with heirloom style flavors, we will need to breed them ourselves. So I am challenging all gardeners everywhere to get busy and take responsibility for breeding the heirloom tomatoes of tomorrow. The book is due out in January. (It's already up for preorders at Amazon, Chelsea Green, and elsewhere.) The book has gone through editing, copyediting, design, cover design, and is now at the proofreaders. It will soon come back to me for final review, probably just when we're trying to harvest about 10,000 lbs of squash.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Oct 8, 2014 12:19:10 GMT -5
oxbowfarm, right. I should have said opaque looking kernels, not opaque pericarp. Pericarp is indeed maternally inherited. And I can't tell on that third ear in your picture, but in the first two ears, there is obviously segregation for flour and flint type.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Oct 8, 2014 12:13:22 GMT -5
reed--I, too started off trying to find a sweet corn that was also good for other things. That was about 30 years ago. I wasted a good five years or more on that approach before I was familiar enough with corn to know what good polenta, parched corn, etc. tasted like. The Indians knew what they were doing. They had sweet corn but grew very little of it, and only for special purposes. (To eat fresh in the green stage, and to dry the green-staged cooked corn for rehydrating in winter soups and stews.) They did not grow it for using the dry grain for making bread, tortillas, polenta, mush, or really as much of a staple. On top of not tasting good for those things, it is self-defeating to grow a grain for the food/endosperm content and then use a genetic mutation in which every kernel fails to develop a full endosperm.
Yes, pure flint kernels and pure flour kernels are distinct and obviously different. But there are plenty of varieties that are in between. The glassy kernels are flint types. As for the red kernels that blew you away, yes. Welcome to parching corn. I have a whole section on it in the corn chapter of The Resilient Gardener. There is an old article of mine on it I did for National Gardening way back when that is free on the internet now that can be found by googling parching corn and my name. I think the title of the original article was "Rediscovering Parching Corn." The photos in the article aren't appropriate and aren't the ones that went with the original magazine piece. They are just some random photos someone shoved in when turning the piece into an internet article.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Oct 8, 2014 11:48:07 GMT -5
joseph, new mutations are not particularly uncommon. If you have one section of the plant appearing that is different from the rest of the plant than it might have had a new dominant mutation occur during vegetative reproduction. So a plant producing one kind of leaf or fruit may have a branch that produces something quite different. And of course accidental crosses between species sometimes do happen. Mixta and moschata don't seem to be "real" different species, either. They are just thinking about being different species someday, but have not fully committed, I figure. They often cross. Where I depend upon species barriers to keep my varieties pure, so plant just moschatas or mixtas but not both.
jondear, I've grown Sweet Mama. It is a C. maxima. It is an F1 hybrid heterozygous for bush. Fruit texture is coarser and flavor not as sweet or intense as many others. And fruit is not very dry either. It's a popular squash in markets, mostly because of it's size and attractive color I think. And earliness. And for market, growers often prefer wetter squash, as it's easier and cheaper to sell water than actual dry squash flesh. The wetter squashes always outyield the really dry ones since squash are sold on a wet weight basis. (Keep this in mind when evaluating the yield of dry-flesh varieties intended for homestead use, where actual food production, not water production, is what matters.)
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Post by Carol Deppe on Oct 8, 2014 11:21:03 GMT -5
Alan, people can by my reselected line of Sweet Meat, 'Sweet Meat--Oregon Homestead' from my own Fertile Valley Seeds or from Nichols Garden Nursery, Adaptive Seeds, or Bountiful Gardens. I reselected for the classic farm homestead type common 30 years ago after the commercial trade screwed up the line. SW-OH has very dry flesh, intense flavor, excellent keeping ability, size up to 25 lbs., small seed cavity, and huge seeds that are especially tasty, and that germinate well in cold mud. It's very vigorous and productive. However, it takes our full growing season. And it doesn't perform well in poor soil or on limited water. It is only worth growing if it is well-grown.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Oct 8, 2014 11:07:48 GMT -5
atash, about powdery mildew and the Cornell varieties touted as resistant to it...not here in Willamette Valley Oregon they aren't. They are affected just as badly as other varieties and die just as fast. Powdery mildew resistance is to particular lines of powdery mildew, and different regions have different lines. I've talked with a C.R. Lawn, who gardens in Massachusetts and is associated with Fedco Seeds. He says they do seem to see the Cornell PM resistant line having some effect, that is, they may be affected a little later and die a little slower. But apparently at best we're talking about a week or two difference. However, that can matter enough to some New England growers to make growing the varieties worth their while.
Cornell Bush delicata at this point has really deteriorated and is very variable in quality compared with when it was first released. And was never as flavorful or fine-grained as 'Sugar Loaf' when it was at it's best.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Oct 8, 2014 11:00:08 GMT -5
Whoops. I should have been replying to atash, not joseph. Carol
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