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Post by alkapuler on Feb 27, 2009 17:22:14 GMT -5
-when i first arrived in Oregon in 1973, the flora was unfamiliar but immediately the unusual umbels caught my eye -one was Lomatium californicum, called wild celery-parsley -at the crossroads of wire fences topped with barbaric wire, a stream embankment had washed out leaving an 8' ditch and a piece of ground isolated by the washout and the wire wherein grew several hundred stocky 1' plants with grey-green glaucous leaves -they had a wonderful aroma, mixed delicious umbel and made quality seasoning -our 9 month old daughter gummed on a root when she began teething and we used a single root weighing about a pound for soup for many months -on a birthday, i was given a large root as big round as my upper leg -usually the seeds are inhabited by weivels and in the patch we found, there were no young plants, seemed like the youngest plants were 20-30 years old -then as part of our seasonal visit to the plants, there were no seeds, and the following year after flowering they set seeds without weivels -we moved a few hundred miles north, planted some of the seeds and several plants have lived in out garden for 15 years; last spring they didn't come up, neither did a piece of a wild collected Lomatium dissectum which had been doing well for a decade -now finally i get to return to Lomatiums and to your wonderful photos, comments and inspiration for continuing to collect and grow these remarkable plants
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 27, 2009 16:22:45 GMT -5
plants stand up well without staking
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 26, 2009 21:47:37 GMT -5
-likely the Vanilla Ice and pale yellow flowered ones are Helianthus debilis, a variety of which has cucumber-like leaves and is decumbent, ie, falls down -in our ongoing sunflower grex, the gloriosas have a mix of background color traits including pale yellow, light orange, dark orange and darker purple pigment is overlaid towards the center of the flowers, but then again by now a few of Red Sun which has dark anthocyanin flowers has crossed into it and some flowers from the cross of Red Sun with Lion's Mane and Supermane, which are doubles, generated Dragon's Fire, a mostly purple double which then crossed with some of the single petaled ones to give intermediate kinds that we call Tiger's Eye (TE) -this intermediate TE trait one can see in the new breeding in Echinacea, Gerbera and in some of the marigolds in our China Cat Mix 2008 where the same phenomenon occurred, ie polypetalous lines like Sparkler and Double Pinwheel crossed to singles like Frances's Choice, Red Metamorph and Golden Star to give a spectrum of TE marigolds not previously seen before
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 26, 2009 21:33:49 GMT -5
-the seeds i sent to Alan were for plants that get 3-5' tall with large leaves, the stems are swollen towards the top of the plant and they have a mixture of traits as if a tall kale crossed with kohlrabi and was selected for what is now called Marrowstem Kale
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 26, 2009 0:43:55 GMT -5
-some many year long time ago, looking at the GRIN listing for sunflowers, there were just too many, and to know what to ask for was difficult, so i asked for one from each country that they listed and in the process got some sunflower seed from Turkey that amazingly turned out to be a giant, remarkable, polypetalous SF that eventually picked up the name Supermane -at about the same time Lon Ronbough sent me some seeds he got from East Germany that were a mix of colors and patterns including ones that looked like gloriosa daisies so they became the Gloriosa Sunflower Mix -since kinship gardening was in the wind, i began collecting and growing as many of the 50 or so Helianthus species that were available, as part of a kinship garden of the Asteraceae -so in the late 1990's we had many different sunflowers growing in our three acre garden; the birds loved them, the market adored them, we picked them and made bouquets -and in the intervening years we have noticed that Helianthus argophyllus, a Texas endemic, outcrossed and conferred several of its distinctive traits to the emerging grex: thin, stiff stems, silvery leaves, racemose spikes with many flowers and a longer flowering season -a new kind of sunflower emerged: late giants-plants will grow all summer, get to 10-12 feet tall, and then in September, burst into bloom with 30-40 arms of flowers -now the birds are especially pleased with food lasting through the winter -and other new kinds of sunflowers are emerging, with polypetalous ones having crossed with gloriosa purple types having crossed with argophyllus outbreeds and some of the plants flower for 4 months, have branches surrounded by 4-6" flowers and give us glimpses of new architectural possibilities for these children of the native species of North America
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 25, 2009 0:06:19 GMT -5
-2 Don Gillogly in the ground along with a volunteer grafted with Mexicola in the ground -maybe 25 in pots of different kinds, mostly Hawaiian, some Californian, a couple also grafted with Mexicolas
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 23, 2009 23:23:13 GMT -5
-in some locales of the PNW (Pacific NorthWest), spring begins in mid-january and lasts until may or june -it begins with snowdrops and croci, followed by Prunus mume, the japanese flowering apricot whose insipid fruits are salted and turned in umeboshi plums, one of the macrobiotics staples for good health -we have been transplanting, out of the greenhouse, starts for lettuce, globe artichokes, romanesco broccoli into nicely tilled beds, pitchforked down the center to break up the tillers habitual hardpan, made during the dry period in most of february, wherein peas are just emerging from earlier plantings, plantings done weeks apart emerging from the soil at the same time -in the greenhouse we have been transplanting small seedlings from flats to pots; red and yellow maca, coreopsis, antirrhinums, brassicas, clivias, cymbidiums, cyrtanthus, crassulas, cacti, grafting avocadoes and citrus, waiting for the harbingers of spring a few who have appeared, the narcissi and fondly gazing over the many new leaves of the tulips, the gems yet to unfold
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 22, 2009 15:10:04 GMT -5
-nice photos of centiflor hypertress tomatoes on the website of www.realseeds.co.uk/-turns out that we haven't fertilized our tomatoes for several years so that the tresses of Red Centiflor, Yellow Centiflor and Red Clusterpear had at best 150 flowers on a tress, the RealSeeds folks have tresses two feet across with hundreds of flowers on an inflorescence
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 22, 2009 14:53:27 GMT -5
This is dedicated to a great seedsman and wonderful person Curtis Showell of Bishopville MD who died at the beginning of 2008 at age 54. He was an extraordinary man, an indefatigable seedsman and remarkable collector of cucurbit seeds with extensive knowledge and interest in watermelons, cantaloupes, and squash. We collaborated for more than two decades and spoke on the phone hundreds of times, discussing cultivars, techniques and the ironies of the SSE. He was well known and highly respected in Europe and Australia, virtually unknown in this country. He was the seedsman for several east coast native Amerindian tribes and sent me hundreds of accessions, most wrapped in the cellophane of old cigarette packs. So for the past several years I sent him boxes of 500 #5 manila coin envelopes so he could distribute seeds. After sending him a box in December 2007, he sent me a packet of C. maxima Hopi While Jack O’Lantern No. 2 Strain on the back of which he wrote “This is my way to say Thank You!” Some of the recent seeds he sent me were Watermelon-Cream of Saskatchewan, Watermelon Early Klondike, Watermelon-Showell Ice Box, Melon-Small Persian, Melon-Kosarga, Melon-Charkovskaja, Grapes-Heirloom Delaware Red. The last two packets of seeds he sent me before he died were Muskmelon-Showell Maryland and Watermelon Orange Flesh- Showell Southern Sweet. He was a great man and unsung genius of the seed saving tradition. I will dearly miss his 11 PM phone calls, his unique dialectic slang and the kind intonation of his voice.
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 20, 2009 19:13:33 GMT -5
-for me, this is truly a renewal of interest in peas -as you observe and discuss in 'Soup Peas', the purple podded ones are bitter and so it was when the first purple podded snap vine had bitter pods -sitting in the greenhouse this morning, making notes about Lomatiums (PNW biscuit roots), my mind kept coming back to how i got seeds for the Parsley Bush Pea and whatever encouraged me to cross it to the bitter purple podded snap -at least now with purple pod (Sugar Magnolia) and yellow pod (Opal Creek) snap vines as parents, there maybe some interesting results -the cross of Spring Blush with Opal Creek is also on the agenda -as Bi Jihuan says "the cooperation is pleased"
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 19, 2009 0:23:34 GMT -5
-how do population sizes vary with the different plants you breed? -why do you think that thale cress (Arabidopsis thaleana) has more gene than we do? -is somatic cell fusion of use in adapting food plants to difficult ecologies? -does the rate of evolution change with temperature? -what nutritional traits are worth improving by breeding? -what do you think of taking genes from a frozen wooly mammoth elephant and putting them in a modern one?
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 18, 2009 20:35:32 GMT -5
aka black lovage from the distinctive black, curved seeds and the carrot-celery-parsley-dill fragrance of the foliage -i can't remember when we got the seeds or from where they came from, but probably a dozen years ago from a botanical garden in France, a few plants came up and then disappeared into the active process of diversity gardening that commands our attention each year -during the past several years, they have become the most successful early, prolific, edible, green growing plant in our early spring garden -they give early green for mixing with compost from the kitchen -they have somewhat deep tap roots that bring up minerals for deeper reaches of the garden beds, just like gobo -interesting to find an adaptivar from Europe that thrives so well in the PNW -earth chestnut, Bunium bulbocastaneum, does well here also but not like Alexander's -seems like a good candidate for a green drink fertilizer to feed the later brassicas, alliums, cucurbits, solanums, grasses
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 18, 2009 20:22:02 GMT -5
-most of us were raised with a limited biology -in my youth, it was animals and plants, and then all the rest -DNA arrived in the mid 50's and things began to change -now we are on to a universal biology -and the times they are a changin'
this marvelous interactive website about gardening, about communication among interested and interesting folk, helps move the SSE in a progressive direction, it also exemplfies the change in communication awareness that is happening grace to computers and the web
gives me some hope in the new age, rebirth of wonder, spring is here
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 15, 2009 22:22:39 GMT -5
in Cantonese it is nga ku or chi ku
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 15, 2009 21:59:21 GMT -5
-in the 1990's Rosemarie and i exchanged long seed lists and many seeds -in my regard, she has been one of the planet's best seed collectors -it has been an honor to work with her
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