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Post by farmermike on Jan 14, 2019 22:13:36 GMT -5
There’s a good thread on this site about nixtamalization. alanbishop.proboards.com/thread/8153/adventures-nixtamalizationHe uses 2 tablespoons of pickling lime to 1/2 gallon of water and 1 quart of corn. Then boil until the pericarp starts to slip (about 15 mins). Rinse the pericarps off in a colander. At this point the nixtamalized corn is still basically raw and hard. He grinds it to make wet masa for tortillas, which then get cooked after being pressed. To make hominy, you have to put it back in a pot of fresh water and boil until it becomes soft enough to eat (maybe another 45 mins?). I found lots of much more complicated hominy recipes online. This one was the simplest and it turned out great. I’ve only tried it with white dent corn so far. Oxbowfarm mentioned that corns with a red pericarp (like bloody butcher) took a lot longer time boiling in the lime water before the pericarp began to slip. I have an electric Wonder Mill, which works great, but it only makes a fine flour — no matter what kind of corn you grind. I think I’m also going to order a Corona hand crank mill for making polenta (from flint corn) and corn meal (from dent corn). Good luck! I love growing grain corn too. I did a mass cross of dent corns a couple years ago, but had a chance to grow it out again. I posted about it here: alanbishop.proboards.com/thread/9215/corn-harvest-2017
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Post by farmermike on Nov 26, 2018 21:48:40 GMT -5
richardw, do you start your salsify seeds in flats or direct sow?
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Post by farmermike on Sept 25, 2018 23:17:46 GMT -5
It has been my experience that the embryo becomes viable very early in the ripening process, but the endosperm will be underdeveloped if the cob is removed from the plant too early.
Since the endosperm provides nutrition for the germinating seedling, underdeveloped kernels seem to grow weakly and have a hard time fighting off mold and such while germinating.
I once harvested a whole field of flour corn very early, due to heavy rodent damage. Some of the cobs had kernels so underdeveloped that they were wrinkled almost like sweet corn. They still sprouted, but weakly.
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Post by farmermike on Sept 25, 2018 14:49:01 GMT -5
Unfortunately, dahlia mosaic virus transmits reliably through true seed. billw, is it possible to use TSP, peroxide, or anything to clean the seeds before sowing to prevent spreading the virus?
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Post by farmermike on Sept 25, 2018 11:35:51 GMT -5
In future seasons I may grow a separate plot of just bush sweet potatoes in order to minimize crossing with the vining ones. This year there was a lot of crossing, I’m sure. , good luck with that! It might work if you only put clones in your bushy patch but seed grown plants just flat won't care. Haha! Well, the 6 of your bushy seeds that I planted this year all grew into bushy plants. Have you not seen the same result from that seed lot? But yeah, I figure I could plant a patch of largely bush clones. I may plant some of their seeds in there too and just plan to cull any that start to vine. I imagine if they’re only getting pollinated by other bush plants, they should produce a high percentage of bush offspring. But my experience is still very limited!
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Post by farmermike on Sept 24, 2018 22:05:31 GMT -5
I have all my sweet potatoes trellised this year. None of the seed grown plants are over 2 or 3 ft. Even the new clones from Sandhill are barely over 3ft in the ground with full sun. But the clones that are in big pots with only partial sun have grown to 8 ft or more. I’m also really liking the couple of bush plants I have from reed’s “bushy bloomer” seeds. They are very manageable plants and may end up being the seediest too. In future seasons I may grow a separate plot of just bush sweet potatoes in order to minimize crossing with the vining ones. This year there was a lot of crossing, I’m sure.
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Post by farmermike on Aug 25, 2018 12:17:49 GMT -5
3 of the purple fleshed varieties I ordered from Sandhill are blooming now: Nam Hai, Purple Delight, and Dingess Purple. Unlike the best seed grown plants, which began blooming when the were still small, these heirlooms needed to climb a bit before flowering (or maybe it was daylength related). This is Nam Hai, blooming profusely, and has a few seed pods developing nicely. Those are surely crossed with the seed grown plants. These flowers are a little larger than the plants from reed’s seeds. Hopefully I’ll get enough of these seeds to share around. Interestingly, only certain plants from each clone are blooming, instead of being uniform as I would have expected.
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Post by farmermike on Aug 14, 2018 18:14:26 GMT -5
I found still no flowers. But sweetpotatoes are getting bigger and are climbing together with passiflora now like other winding Ipomoeas. Interesting. These are 3 seedlings from last year.
That is interesting! None of my plants, seedling or heirloom, have thin twinning vines like that. All mine have thick stems with no inclination to climb on their own. I have been trellising them, but I have to thread them through the fencing myself. Though I have to say that sweet potato vines are a joy to work with. They are more pliable than any other vining crop I have grown. I haven’t broken a stem all season — unlike the fragile/brittle bean and tomato stems. Where did you get your original seed, imgrimmer? How much sun are your plants getting? I assume that lots of sunlight would encourage flowering.
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Post by farmermike on Aug 11, 2018 17:31:32 GMT -5
I collected my first ripe seeds yesterday! Also, while I was doing some hand pollinating earlier in the season, I noticed that there was variation between plants in the length of the stamens. Some have both long and short stamens; some have only short. I wonder if this has anything to do with whether or not they are self-compatible.
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Post by farmermike on Aug 1, 2018 11:37:25 GMT -5
reed, thanks for the seed pod photo. That is helpful. I should be able to start collecting seeds any day now. We still have a good 3 months of warm weather left, so hopefully I'll get a lot of seeds. Who do you have on pollination duty? In years past for me it has primarily been a particular type of small bumblebee. This year is way different. The larger bumblebees have taken interest as have the microbees and even some butterflies. Also a new to me even smaller bumblebee, they are nearly all black with just a little yellow. I'v never seen them before, they liked the tassels of the Zapalote Chico corn and now that it's goen they have moved to the sweet potatoes. O' I think I sent you some I pandaruta seed, did you start any of those? Mine didn't sprout, I'm guessing they might need cold stratification which I did not do. I have lots more seed so will do that for next year. I saw on an unrelated thread that there can be gene transfer through grafting. That's getting a little advanced for my skill level but thinking of giving it a try. I can easily stop and collect some pandurata stems and see what happens if I stick them on some sweet potato roots. At first I didn't see much pollinator interest. A bumble or carpenter bee would stop by a flower for a second then fly away. So, I started hand pollinating, which isn't too difficult. I just removed the corolla and the pistil from a flower on one plant, and swabbed the stamens into every open flower on different plants. But then I started to see honeybees visiting them. Now every morning there are always a couple of honeybees in the sweet potato patch. They seem to be the perfect size to squeeze in there and capture pollen on their head and thorax, and then deposit it on the stigma of the next flower. I'm still doing occasional hand pollinations, just in case, but I'm not too worried about that anymore. I never got around to sowing the I. pandurata seeds this year, but that's good to know that they may need cold stratification. I'll plan to do that for next spring. That sounds like a really interesting plant to grow, even if crosses with sweet potato are not successful. Do you know if I. pandurata can be vegetatively propagated as well?
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Post by farmermike on Jul 31, 2018 17:52:07 GMT -5
Well, my plant with the green lobed leaves turned out to be the first to flower and the first to start making seed pods. Some plants seem to have pale green seed pods. This one has purple. About 1/3 of my 15 seed grown sweet potato plants are blooming profusely. 3 plants are beginning to form pods. A few of my commercial or heirloom clones are starting to form flower buds too. I'm very interested in crossing those with the seed grown plants, in order to combine their seediness with the purple and orange roots. reed, at what point would you harvest the pods so that they don't shatter and drop their seeds? The one on the left in my photo is the oldest pod (and the blurriest). This is currently my most exciting breeding project!
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Post by farmermike on Jul 22, 2018 18:06:58 GMT -5
keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.), I wonder if you just kept cooking them would they soften up like a normal pea soup? (You might have to keep adding pre-boiled water to the pot.) I’ve never cooked non-split soup peas before. Have you had that experience with other peas? I did seed increases on a few soup peas this year (including Biskopens) and am planning to plant large patches for eating this fall.
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Post by farmermike on Jun 11, 2018 17:17:11 GMT -5
farmermike , that plant in lower right of your picture is the first I'v seen with green lobed leaves. Will be interesting to see what comes from it. Here is a photo of that plant today. None of the other plants in the patch have such deeply lobed leaves like this (even those with purple leaves). The only other that comes close is the one orange root variety, from the grocery store, that I managed to salvage from last year. Most of the seed grown plants and the Sandhill plants have heart shaped leaves. Edit: Also, you can’t see them in the photo, but that plant is also the first to form flower buds!
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Post by farmermike on Jun 9, 2018 17:14:28 GMT -5
Last year I began a beet landrace project. I started out with the "beet blend" from West Coast Seeds. This mix contained most of the common color variations, but no white beets. I grew out a patch of these seeds and didn't do any selection; I just let everything go to seed (maybe that was unwise). The problem was that the different phenotypes (varieties) didn't really want to flower at the same time. There was some overlap, but probably a lot of selfing too. This spring, I grew out a little test patch of the saved seed. Most of the beets looked like the varieties I am familiar with, but some white ones showed up too. If any of these are crosses, they would be the F1 generation. I don't really want too many white beets (although they tasted fine), but I do want to grow out some crosses and mix up the genetics a bit. I'm trying to figure out if the white phenotype serves as an indication that a cross actually occurred, as opposed to a self pollination within one variety. My (limited) understanding is that white is epistatic over red and yellow. So a cross between a red and yellow may produce some whites? Not sure what causes the striped "chioggia" phenotype. Most of my ideas about beet color inheritance comes from billw's blog post about Ulluco color genetics and this paper from the 1930s. So, does it make sense to let any of the white ones make seeds? Or should I assume that some of the colored beets are also crosses? I'm fine with some white beets showing up, but I ultimately don't want to select for it.
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Post by farmermike on Jun 9, 2018 12:22:34 GMT -5
How are every one else's TSPS plants doing this year? Here are my TSPS plants that I got in the ground on May 18th. The 3 on the left are from Bushy Bloomer. The rest are from Reed's general TSPS mix. We had a couple weeks of cool windy weather in late May, so they haven't really taken off yet, but they're still looking healthy. I also ordered 4 purple sweet potato varieties from Sandhill (Nam Hai, Purple Delight, Dingess Purple, Molokai Purple). I planted those on June 7th in the same bed as the seed grown plants. Hopefully I'll get some crosses with the purple ones! I have high hopes for getting a decent amount of seeds this year. I also had one more Bushy Bloomer seed pop up 2 months after the rest of the seeds. I may just grow that one in a pot, as I'm out of garden space now.
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