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Post by oxbowfarm on May 4, 2018 19:48:46 GMT -5
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Post by oxbowfarm on May 3, 2018 14:49:19 GMT -5
So I've gone ahead and gotten some various potato germplasm from the USDA, including 3 accessions of Solanum jamesii "Four Corners Potato". Two accessions from southwestern Colorado and one from Central Utah. Unfortunately two of the accessions had severe issues with damping off, so I only have two seedlings of the Utah accession and about three from Mesa Verde, Colorado. The other Colorado accession gave me a lot of seedlings, which I've potted up into individual deep pots. jamesii seedlings do some crazy stuff, the lower nodes on the young seedlings dive into the ground instead of forming new branches like a tuberosum seedling. [
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Post by oxbowfarm on Apr 30, 2018 18:47:46 GMT -5
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Post by oxbowfarm on Apr 30, 2018 11:04:31 GMT -5
Pulled four off-type plants out of my first two sucessions of tatsoi, there were about 5 plants out of 200+ that were clearly crosses, almost certainly with Joy Choi pac choi based on the phenotype and my past seed saving. I really liked the look of the F1 plants, the petioles were narrow like tatsoi but long and white like pac choi and the leaf came to a dramatic and clear transition at the top of the petiole, without all the leafy margins that you often see on pac choi. The plants were fairly large and upright like a pac choi but much leafier on average. I pulled the four best plants and set them in this nursery bed outdoors to try and get some F2 seed to experiment with. I also planted several F2 plants from my ongoing mustard project, crossing Tim Peter's Oak Fire Mustard with my strain of CesarZ's GoldenFrills/9-Hearts Mustard cross. I'm hoping to get a red version of the CesarZ cross, with the big robust multi-heading frilling plant style, just in red/purple. I really prefer to grow mustards as whole plants, and the modern breeding work seems to be solely focussed on breeding for micro-greens use. I need a big plant for bunching, and the addition of the Chinese 9-hearts/Er cai type plant style really makes for a big plant. I think the mustards will do well in this nursery, as the plants are still small, but if we get too many hard cold snaps between now and June I may lose the tatsoi/pac choi cross plants, as they are already bolting and have very little cold tolerance left.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Apr 30, 2018 10:49:59 GMT -5
The mother plant contributes all the cytoplasm, and all the cytoplasmic DNA from the organelles that have DNA, sometimes that matters and sometimes it doesn't.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Apr 8, 2018 9:35:52 GMT -5
I guess I don't understand why such a tomato would be useful or desired?
Tomatoes are naturally high in lycopene, and with existing known genes can be bred to be naturally high in beta carotene. A solid argument can be made that beta carotene is a much more valuable nutritional compound as it is a vitamin precursor and an anti-oxidant. Lycopene is a valuable anti-oxidant and is protective against things like macular degeneration.
There are MANY foods that are naturally high in anthocyanins, much higher than I suspect tomatoes can ever be bred to be.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Apr 1, 2018 7:02:01 GMT -5
Not all soup peas are the same. The modern green and yellow soup peas grown commercially naturally disintegrate into a puree when cooked. That isn't universal among old fashioned soup peas like Capuciners, which remains whole after cooking, much more like a dry bean does. I actually find them more interesting culinarily, but the modern plant type with the hypertendril/afila gene combined with dwarf foliage is a lot easier to plant, not needing trellising.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Mar 27, 2018 20:03:55 GMT -5
Hey reed, There isn't so much pericarp color diversity in readily available flour corns. I have noticed this corn on GRIN before, and its clearly a single color pericarp flour corn, that some guy pulled out of Shawnee White, which is in the Eastern White Flour complex. In terms of pericarp color diversity, the champion is still bronze beauty flint in my experience. Its a flint though, but it IS a white endosperm flint. So you might consider it. I've got about a gallon of seed in my freezer if you want some.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Mar 27, 2018 19:56:16 GMT -5
richardw I'd say it is pretty much due to our climate. My understanding of fava beans preferences is that they like a long cool growing season. So they make great crops in spring summer in the UK and northern Europe and the Pacific Northwest, and they make nice winter crops in the Mediterranean and the Gulf Coast of the US. But here we have winters that are too cold for favas to survive, let alone grow, and our springs become summer very quickly, and conditions are far warmer than they like. Favas hate it here. But they do produce a little seed, so I think a landrace might work. I'm just not interested enough in them right now to even try.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Mar 25, 2018 8:31:59 GMT -5
I actually don't have a lot of uses for landrace varieties myself here on my farm. For market, I do need a certain amount of uniformity for ease of packing and marketing the vegetables I sell. So I like to have patches of vegetables that are more or less all the same size and come in more or less at the same maturity. The breeding projects I do tend to be more built around deliberate crosses of known varieties with subsequent selection in the following generations to get whatever it is that I'm looking for.
In terms of landrace breeding, the best place for it would be for marginal crop species that aren't really worth growing here as they are. Things like Runner Beans, which grow great vines and flower profusely but produce minimal amounts of viable seed. Likewise Fava beans, which barely yield the same amount of seed that got planted, if I actually liked fava beans I might explore this. Those would be great candidates for a landrace project here, and I'm actually building a runner bean landrace.
For many other crops I can't see the benefit for my situation. I think the technique is a great one, but it isn't necessary or even beneficial for every crop in every climate.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Mar 24, 2018 18:16:38 GMT -5
I think the primary advantage that I can see is with crops that typically do not thrive in your climate. Joseph couldn't successfully mature moschata or argyrosperma squash in his climate in N Utah using commonly available OP varieties. Now he has well adapted landrace populations that are reliable producers for him. So its a great method for recombining genetics to achieve rapid adaptation. If you are in the PNW, the crop species that are marginal in your climate are probably ones that require more heat units than your season provides, so a landrace breeding program might work well for those crops.
I don't know of anyone who says you have to grow only landraces, or that they are always better than OPs or hybrids.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Mar 19, 2018 15:26:30 GMT -5
It might be possible to track some down from some of Carol's collaborators, Alan Kapuler, Krista Rome, Tessa Gowan, definitely check with Nichol's Garden Nursery. They are all in the PNW and may have some of Carol's work but are not currently listing it for sale? Just a possibility.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Mar 19, 2018 15:19:50 GMT -5
ditto sci-hub I would have Alexandra Elbakyan's babies if there weren't so many social, cultural and biological barriers to actually doing that.
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Row 7
Mar 12, 2018 8:58:46 GMT -5
Post by oxbowfarm on Mar 12, 2018 8:58:46 GMT -5
I hope that most of my customers are not dumb. There are all kinds of external forces from society that place folks in their situation, so when they are looking at produce, they are trying to make careful calculations about what is possible for their lifestyle. The biggest reason people like all the easy pre-prepped options is that on average people have less time to cook. And they use leftovers much less. Is it not better to succeed in selling a Honeynut or a Delicata that someone WILL buy, vs trying and failing to sell a big Neck Pumpkin in the 20 lb range? If people want to eat like Carol Deppe, then they are probably going to be growing their own big squash, vs buying it from me. I wouldn't personally want to be a single mom trying to feed her kids healthy vegetables while holding down whatever jobs she's got and solving the many problems entailed in living that life. It pleases me to sell her vegetables she can actually use, and I think we are performing a mutually beneficial transaction when we do so.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Mar 11, 2018 9:23:57 GMT -5
I think you will find you will get reasonable crossing rates with different varieties planted in a mixed block planting as long as you have sufficient small pollinators in your local ecology. Lettuces are largely selfing, similar to the polyploid brassicas, but they DO cross naturally without having to do all the hoop jumping and washing the stigmas etc. The bees can do it for you as long as the flowers are all adjacent to each other.
With my mustard breeding projects, I've found that even when I plant two different varieties right next to each other at isolated sites, probably 80-90% of the seed from each plant is selfed. But 10% crossed seed per plant ends up being a HUGE number of F1 offspring anyway with a crops like these that produce so many flowers and so much seed per plant.
For a low stress landrace project I'd just mix all my seed I wanted in my lettuce landrace and let it bolt as a block.
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