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Row 7
Mar 11, 2018 8:54:11 GMT -5
Post by oxbowfarm on Mar 11, 2018 8:54:11 GMT -5
Well, I can tell you that most of my customers do like sweet vegetables. They like modern sweet corn, and they like very (naturally) sweet squashes. They also like convenient, which is why the grocery stores have gone so deep into pre-cut, pre-peeled, pre-prepped, nitro-packed everything, even though it is a proven food safety nightmare. Mainstream modern conventional average joe and jane Americans don't cook from scratch all that much, and they have palates trained to like sweet foods. I'm not going to convince most of them to buy a 10 -20 pound butternut, and if I tell them to change their lifestyle to work with the squash, or tell them that they have an unsophisticated palate, they'll just stop buying my stuff. Realistically, modern vegetable breeders are breeding for modern tastes. I love Joseph's Landrace Moschata and it is a main component of my own landrace butternut, but most of the squash I got out of Joseph's original seed was WAY to large to attract my customers. There is a reason that Michael Mazourek developed Honeynut and is still breeding similar mini butternuts like 898. It is great to garden for your own tastes, but I've got to grow what will actually sell, to a certain extent. I do grow lots of stuff that is unusual and I can talk my customers into trying things, but only up to a point.
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Row 7
Mar 9, 2018 10:28:11 GMT -5
Post by oxbowfarm on Mar 9, 2018 10:28:11 GMT -5
Quite the copy editor they have! That's a pretty smooth site . . . Some of those varieties are F1s (including that cuc), so MTAs may not be needed. You're not afraid of an F1 are you? The only time I avoid using an F1 as parent material is if I'm pretty sure it has male sterility which isn't an issue in cucurbits, especially cukes.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Mar 8, 2018 10:17:50 GMT -5
Just FYI. So there is this new outlet for some interesting breeding work coming out of cornell they are call ing Row 7 seeds. Surprisingly it isn't all protected by PVPs, MTAs, or utility patents. They even specifically state on the website that they won't be utility patenting the stuff, so I though that was interesting since the stuff I've gotten from Michael Mazourek's program has required signing Cornell MTAs in the past. The thing that I find really intriguing is this 7082 cucumber. "Named for its trial plot, the 7082 cucumber is a stubbled green slicer of modest stature but memorable flavor—which, when it comes to cucumbers, is no small feat. Breeder Michael Mazourek recalls stories of long-forgotten cucumbers that filled a room with their fragrance. Today, he is working to rediscover them, marrying heirloom flavors with modern disease resistance in the field. For Mazourek, the search for a truly delicious cucumber begins with exploring the bitter compounds that have been selected against for decades. It turns out a little bitterness goes a long way in adding complexity and depth of flavor—a kind of vegetable diplomacy. And it goes a long way in the field, too, helping to deter pests for organic growers." This description is compelling enough for me to trial them, coupled with having met Michael and found him to be a really willing to give advice on cucurbit breeding.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Feb 25, 2018 23:23:26 GMT -5
khoomeizhi the only problem is that TCM practitioners are kind of hard to access as a market. We recently joined a cooperative to try and grow and market certain TCM medicinal species, and it gets really complicated really fast. Its not like you can dry something and take it to the farmers market or whatever, or even put in on ebay or something. Most TCM medicinals are used with other species that are compiled by the practitioner into the specific formula. The problem is they are used to being able to buy the most of the stuff from the same source, even though the pharmacopeia of TCM runs the gamut of species from all kinds of different faraway places. So there is a tradition of the herbs being sold and then repurchased to and from a collating middleman who ends up having everything they need. So traditionally, the grower or gatherer sold the herb to the processor, who sold it to the middleman, who collected the massive variety of the pharmacopeia and then sold it to the practitioners. Thats a hard chain to break into and make money at it. I'm not advocating for or against TCM, and I've really loved the TCM medicinal species that we've tried. Putting small strips of my fields into heavy blooming perennials seems like a great thing for my farm ecologically, both for the insect ecology and for soil improvement and rotation purposes.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Feb 25, 2018 14:32:48 GMT -5
Much more of this and I'd say the stone fruit is likely to be shot this year, and its shaping up to be a terrible syruping year.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Feb 25, 2018 14:31:02 GMT -5
Is it used fresh or dried in TCM, do you know?
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Post by oxbowfarm on Feb 25, 2018 14:28:56 GMT -5
Species identification is different. In the situation of my MIL village, I doubt anything much had "variety" names, and I doubt many if anyone knew or cared about taxonomy, but they knew all the crops and trees and vines and wild plants without any trouble. One big exception to that were figs and grapes. They had many varieties of each, and they all had very specific names. But I think pretty much any leafy cabbage family crop was "couves".
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Post by oxbowfarm on Feb 21, 2018 5:48:28 GMT -5
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Post by oxbowfarm on Feb 19, 2018 18:20:14 GMT -5
I've found this link to be helpful to a pdf of Breeding Vegetable Crops. faculty.agron.iastate.edu/fehr/BVC/01BVC.PDF If you change the number in the section that starts - /01BVC to another digit /04, /05, etc it takes you to the next chapter. I cannot remember how I found this link and I don't know if there is more since I cannot find the menu/ sitemap. But the chapters you can reach with this method are pretty neat. No Doubt there is a better way to navigate this than retyping the chapter number in the address bar, but I'm too lazy to learn how to do so. 01 is sweet potatoes (yo reed) 02 is watermelons 03 is tomatoes 04 is peppers 05 is cucumbers 06 is squash 07 is snap beans 08 is peas 09 is carrots 10 is onions 11 is cabbage 12 is lettuce 13 is sweetcorn 14 is asparagus
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Post by oxbowfarm on Feb 17, 2018 19:58:58 GMT -5
reed it was a bust. Not because the corn didn't work, but I screwed it up by leaving them in the tray too long. I've found that if I leave them in those plug sheets much past V5, many corns think they are dying and they prematurely tassel and die. Not all corn, but definitely Zapalote Chico did that for me. I don't have a good excuse, but it was just one of those things where I didn't have time, forgot, or whatever and they sat in the greenhouse for a couple extra weeks and so ALL the corns I was trying to add into the flour corn project in 2017 from transplants didn't produce anything. I also didn't get any additional trays planted like I said I was going to in the video. On the other hand, my flint corn project got done everything on time, and I got seed from Tarahumara Golden Cristalino, Chapalote, and Onaveño. So the year wasn't a total bust, but I didn't give my flour corn project the same attention as the flint. Mostly I think this was because I was EASY to access the flint corn patch and so I was thinking about it often, and the flour corn was over behind my barn and I forgot it all the time. I've noticed that I flake out on one or the other project some years. I still have high hopes for Zapalote Chico, both due to the maysin/earworm resistance and due to it being a premium tortilla corn from Oaxaca. I honestly don't see much damage from earworm, I'm not in a big corn growing area, I'd say that my corn is the only corn grown in a 5 mile radius so I think its a bit too patchy for the moths to make a big impact on me. I mostly have issues with birds and foliar disease.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Feb 11, 2018 14:48:57 GMT -5
Your are precisely correct yellow endosperm with blue aleurone = green. Though it doesn't have to be dilute, it works with full blue too (you just get a bluer shade of green) Not in my experience. When I crossed yellow dents with Oaxacan Green Dent I got progeny with blue kernels and yellow kernels, almost never any green expressed again. This made me feel like a recessive dilution gene for blue aleurone was getting hidden. I bet it would have shown up again in later generations, but I abandonded the project. I also have blue kicking around in my flint, which I'm working as fast and hard as I can towards high carotene orange endosperm and yet I still get the occasional blue kernel, even though I never plant a blue kernel or even use seed from ears with blue on them. It doesn't express as a bluer shade of green, it expresses as dark blue. I feel like you need a diluter to be able to see the yellow. I have no genetic data to back that up.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Feb 10, 2018 22:00:03 GMT -5
One of the striking thing about certain pictures of GG, especially the picture that went viral, was the very translucent glassy endosperm that was visible in most or all the kernels, and how much green was expressed.
I've only messed around with green colored corn a small amount, in my first corn project I was doing a dent corn mass cross and included Oaxacan Green Dent in the mix. The strain I had was almost completely green, but when crossed with other corns it almost immediately expressed as blue. My suspicion is that green kernels are a diluted blue aleurone expressing over yellow endosperm, so you need a yellow endosperm and color dilution genes in order to get reliably green kernel color.
I think an all green kernel corn would be pretty interesting to see. I'm not planning on messing with it though.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Feb 8, 2018 18:29:35 GMT -5
I know you have negative opinions regarding Glass Gem corn. I am abivalent to the whole Glass Gem wondercorn hype thing but you really have me wondering about the true story behind GG. If I may respecfully ask, what am I missing that bothers you (and many others) so much about it? Again, I am just curious. I mean, it seems to be strictly an ornamental corn so why is there any issue regarding its provenance? There is a valid market out there for pretty ornamental corn, even if it is just a vanity thing. I guess the thing that bothers me about Glass Gem is the BS hype and misleading hucksterism that surrounded the GG craze. Starting with the backstory around Carl Barnes. I've got nothing against Carl Barnes, but the story was told as if he was a Cherokee amalgam of Obi-wan Kenobi and Luther Burbank. The emphasis on his native american heritage seemed deliberately over-hyped to try and sell the corn as if it was for all intents and purposes a sacred Cherokee heirloom instead of Carl Barnes' personal work product of his own intentional breeding program. The focus on his RACE vs his personal accomplishments as a plant breeder bugged me a lot. I guess any corn is cooler if you can say you got it from an Indian? To me its way more interesting that a guy in Eastern Oklahoma was breeding his own corn varieties, than that he was a Cherokee. Cherokee people are not particularly difficult to find in eastern Oklahoma, but amateur plant breeders are kind of rare everywhere. To top it off, most of this BS hype was begun and perpetuated by Native Seeds/SEARCH, including the rainbow photo that kept going viral and getting used on ebay etc. And NS/S was charging more for GG than all the other ACTUAL HEIRLOOM varieties they have collected. And they were putting people on a waiting list etc to amp up the viral furor, and then Bill McDorman got all bent out of shape that other people were selling it on ebay, when HE CREATED the whole artificial scarcity that made it possible. It was very disappointing to see one of my favorite seed companies behave so unethically (JMO). I also am just frustrated with the way people are only interested in pretty corn, vs all the other really interesting corns that are out there. Painted Mtn is a great corn, and an amazing bit of plant breeding work by one dedicated creator, but the reason its so popular is because there are lots of pretty ornamental colors in it. Being someone who raises two different grexes of corn that aren't visually dazzling like that (although I find them beautiful) but are being selected for nutritional/culinary quality, it rubs me the wrong way a bit that most folks just look at corn as a decorative object. And so I like to shit on GG when I think of it.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Feb 8, 2018 18:02:12 GMT -5
toomanyirons just a response to your notes with regards to plant spacing. After reading Carol Deppe's Resilient Gardener I started planting very thickly and thinning for vigor. I don't know if it has improved my cold soil emergence and seedling vigor but I can say that I lose almost no plants to bird pulling anymore, which was a huge issue the first few years I was growing corn here. Redwing blackbirds, starlings, and crows for the most part. I attribute this to improved selection for strong root growth over shoot growth pre-emergence. But I don't have any data to back that up, just much better stands than I had at first. I really like this video that Frank Kutka and Dave Christensen made on selecting seedlings this way. You can see how ruthless he is when he is selecting. I know I've badmouthed Painted Mtn for the Eastern climate, but I think Dave Christensen is a giant of a corn breeder. The one problem with deliberately overplanting this way is that you have to get in there and thin the hell out of it or the corn ends up choking itself out and its just about good for nothing but pasture or maybe silage. You have to be able to get in there at V5-V7 and remove all the extra seedlings before they start crowding each other.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Feb 8, 2018 7:50:45 GMT -5
Actually , I looked at Sierra Seeds website and it is hard to see if you can actually order seeds from them right now or not. Seems like they are mostly doing classes and stuff and have a "seed CSA". I'm sure if you contacted her though you could arrange to buy some or she could connect you with a source for a good strain of it.
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