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Post by blueadzuki on Sept 7, 2013 6:06:57 GMT -5
Well at least your breeding experiments mean you have plenty of garlic available for them.
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Post by blueadzuki on Sept 6, 2013 18:45:33 GMT -5
Not a bad idea though whether you'd want mostly Eurasian Hazels, on the grounds that those are the ones most people are used to or native Western Hazels(Corylus cornuta var. californica ) on the grounds that being native they'll probably do better in the area. not to mention their shubbyness will make them ideal for encouraging young kids to go nutting (A summer camp I used to go to had some copses to eastern beaked Hazel, and I always drove me crazy I was never there when the nuts were ripe.) Though I'm not sure how keen people would stay with picking them. A lot of people not familiar with hazels don't know the nut shells will form whether or not there is an actual nut in them and after taking in hundreds of empties, I imagine a lot of people will get discouraged (I remember going out in colledge to a Turkish Hazel with a giant plastic cup full of water in nut season, and dropping handful after handful of nuts in to find "sinkers". Out of 5-600 nuts I dropped in I think I got a grand total of 3 with actual nuts (lot of squirrel activity they probably got most of the good ones)
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Post by blueadzuki on Sept 4, 2013 5:49:08 GMT -5
As far as I can tell green is the result of blue-bluish purple aleurone over yellow endosperm. That's why you tend to get a few kernels with yellowish tops (blue weak to turned off) and some with bluish purpilish tops (blue so strong it's covering up the yellow completely, or the yellow being weak to turned off) Pericarp doesn't really come into it (from what I've seen the pericarp of Oxacan is pale brown). As for upping the dark green, the best advice I can think of would be to simply select for dark green kernels. Getting the corn 100% of any shade is probably nearly impossible (since there will always be kernels that will revert) but if you pick for the shade you want you might be able to skew things towards the desired result.
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Post by blueadzuki on Aug 29, 2013 18:25:44 GMT -5
Well there's another odd bit; the pods on both the Bantu and the Fort Portal mixed are also very flat and both are hairy though the hairs are presumably fairly short and dense (I can't see them so well, but the make the pods feel very rough and sticky). the Bantus look almost EXACTLY like the pods on the blue speckled right down to the extreme bulges at eat seed node ( the fort portals are a little flatter and not as sticky. I'm not questioning your assessment, but every time you seem to show a comparison, my bantu beans seem to look more like your teparies in the equasion than your standards. Actually now that I think of it, even the bantu seed looks rather tepary like, it's smallish roundish and has that dark ring around the hilum that a lot of them do.
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Post by blueadzuki on Aug 15, 2013 8:59:22 GMT -5
The bad news, no, you can't cut it in half and have half ripen on. There is a sort of Italian gourd/zucchini where you CAN do that (don't remember the name at the moment) but Cucumbers have too much water in them to suberize (make a corky layer to re protect the part you cut off) The good news (though probably not in this case as I would guess your cucumber is a standard type) is that there are some cucumbers that are still edible at a point where the inner seed is ripe. Kiva types (usually from Asia with yellowish to brownish skins with cantelope crackles on them) are that kind, you can scoop out the seed cavity for growing material , and then eat the leftover flesh.
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Post by blueadzuki on Aug 13, 2013 16:02:57 GMT -5
To answer the first question, I do not know, since I am not all that well versed in the genetics of what determines flour versus flint versus dent. Sweet is a yes/no affair. There may be different mutations that cause it, but a kernel is either sweet corn or not sweet corn; there's no such thing as a kernel that is part sweet part not (though I do have a couple odd kernels I have accumulated over the years that seem to be sweet on one side of the kernel and flint on the other.) Flour versus flint versus dent however is more along the lines of a spectrum, a kernel can be nearly all hard starch (flint)* pure soft starch (flour) or pretty much anywhere in between. So it's possible it's unstable. Hereogeneous is less likey as then youd expect cobs of all one or the other (the population could be mixed if it was hetero, but not the actual individual cobs. As for "not well selected", well it depends on what you are selecting for. Functionally, assuming you have a wheel that can take flint, grinding a flint flour mixture would not be all that different from grinding a dent; if the starch ratio is the same, the meal you get out should be comparable. And a lot of those variations of flint flour are what I call "cap" corn which is essentially dentless dent. And "shell" corn (mostly soft starch with a thin shell of hard all around the outside) is actually HIGHER in soft than most dents. In fact when I have a choice I tend to think shell types are probably better than dents for some areas, mine for example (the hard starch shell gives it nearly the insect resistance of a flint, with and actual grind almost like a flour. As for the second, the answer is, maybe, but not necessarily. Dent are a specialized form of soft and hard starch mix where the soft reaches all the way to the top of the kernel. As it dries down or is pressed on, the soft starch compresses more, making the dent (that's why a lot of dents don't dent on the butt kernels or if they don't have other kernels pressing on their sides, no pressure, no dent.). If the flour flint has that configuration it might dent, if it doesn't it wont.
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Post by blueadzuki on Aug 13, 2013 15:14:54 GMT -5
Some Southwestern corns are mixed kernel. Some kernels the corn makes will be floury, some will be flinty and some will be in between. I've got a lot of corns like that I've found (most of my northern flours are in fact flour flints)
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Post by blueadzuki on Aug 13, 2013 9:15:19 GMT -5
Looks like the Chinese fennel seed I grew a few years ago (that basically bolted instantly as soon as it came up, when it came up)
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Post by blueadzuki on Aug 13, 2013 8:33:13 GMT -5
scan of some of the "sticker" chickpeas
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Post by blueadzuki on Aug 12, 2013 16:30:48 GMT -5
That happens a lot, with desis; because the skins are so much thicker, a lot of them don't imbibe easily. If you are cooking them the hot water/jostling due to boiling can usually get through (though not always) If you are growing them you can simply chip a bit off the seed coat of each one that didn't imbibe; the hole will let the water in (I suggest making the hole on the fat end that way you don't risk damaging the radicle.)
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Post by blueadzuki on Aug 12, 2013 15:14:57 GMT -5
You're welcome
I'll have to do a little searching through my supplies. There may have been a few oversized desis in that Korean stuff I found a few months ago. I'd offer you some of what I grew a few years ago as well, but I think all I have left are "stickers" and no one apart from a botanist would EVER want to grow them (the small bumps on the seed coats make them stick like Velcro, so they tend to get dirt, mud, vegetable matter etc PERMANANTLY stuck in them, making them near useless as food.)
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Post by blueadzuki on Aug 12, 2013 13:59:10 GMT -5
The harvested seeds were tiny compared to grocery store seeds, but any harvest is better than I have done in previous years. Well, they're all desi's, I can see that from the picture. desi types just aren't as large seeded as Kabouli types. If your REALLY desperate to get a big seeded one Richter's seed zoo has a type called the Munk's Morroccan that they say was chosen as the largest brown ( desi type) chickpea they could find, so that may be close to Kabouli sized. I'm trying some next year maybe (I'd offer to send you some seed, but I don't like to count my chickens before their hatched.)
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Post by blueadzuki on Aug 11, 2013 8:57:06 GMT -5
Well, I certainly know about the pest problem. For everal years, I had a pot of Clove/Tree Basil (Ocinum granitissimum) (which unlike most of the other basils, is perennial, it doesn't automatically senesce when the seeds are done) . Ever fall it would come in, and within a matter of weeks, it would get a devastating case of unshakable whitefly. one so bad that none of the standard whitefly treatments really made much of a dent in the population. it's spend the winter on the radiator, shedding curled up leaf after curled up leaf and infecting everything else (the reason I ultimately gave up after 3-4 years and let the thing freeze) come spring it would be a nearly dead, nearly leafless pile of sticks just barely clinging onto life, which would then take half the summer to spring back, such half the life it had left in it out to produce a new flower/seed flush, then go through the whole process again. In fact after about year 2 I'm not sure if the plant actually GREW anymore; it sort of reached a plateau where the net growth it would have had over the summer was consumed by what it lost over the winter. There's actually one other problem to consider with regard to those two beans. Despite my best efforts the plants in the two pots have intertwined themselves between the pots, so getting them moved would probably some pretty good synchronized motion from me and my dad (the flowers are on the intertwined bits, so clipping them apart is a no-go) But I may still try; with no source for fresh Bantu seed, and the Bantu's being the best bean I had this year, the more seed I can pull out of the one I have left, the happier I'll be. Of course this may all be moot, for all I know these two are just unusually long season (I imagine a Ugandan bean could get away with that, in the full tropics (Fort portal is about half a degree from the equator), there really aren't any seasons to speak of, so what drives a plant to stop is unclear.) I did notice something that may indicate the plants ARE running out of steam; while the last flush of beans matured beautifully the seeds (especially on the Batu, dried down to only about half the size of the last batch). Though since the plants were also tangled up with each other, it could just be that the ones making seed now are different plants than those that made seed last time.)
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Post by blueadzuki on Aug 10, 2013 15:41:47 GMT -5
Hi All Does anyone have any experience with how (common) bean plants handle overwintering indoors. To my surprise unlike most of my beans over the years (which at a certainly point, simply stop producing and curl up) Those few African plants I still have left (1 bantu, 3-4 fort portals) seem to be in a state of perpetual production, still cranking out flowers and pods on a near constant basis. So given that 1. they are still doing that 2. they are self pollinating, and 3. they are in pots (easy to transport) I was wondering if it might make sense to simply take the pots indoors once it gets cold, so as to have a supply of fresh green beans all through the winter. My searches over the web have been a little confusing; some sites seem to say that perennial P.vulgaris just plain don't exist (if you want perennial those sites say, grow runner). others seem to say they do, (such as something called the seven year bean). Anyone have any personal experience to clarify?
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Post by blueadzuki on Aug 10, 2013 14:13:30 GMT -5
I would add that, in my opinion, a pea also has to be thin skinned (seed coated) to be a decent sheller. Thick skinned ones are usually not all that pleasant to eat, no matter how sweet they are, the thick seed coats get stuck in your teeth too easily.
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