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Post by canadamike on Feb 3, 2017 14:57:45 GMT -5
Hello fellow canadian.... I think you should try MANITOBA, amongst the earlies but really flavourfull. Here on the farm, we grow 25 acres of maters, I have one acre to do trials and research, we had BLOODY BUTCHER and BEAVERLODGE SLICER, a few days later, as our first ones ready for market. Bloody is a bit small but very flavourful, it is a cocktail tomatoes, but Beaverlodge Slicer came short after and we had the first local tomatoes of the season.
I have tried them all, the Glacier, the Sub-Artic series, Siberian, Stupice, The .....bec series from mr Doucet, Bloody and Beaverlodge beat them all if you want my opinion. Stupice always fight for first of the season with Bloody Butcher, but the taste profile is just ok all season long while Bloody will taste great... There is also a Beaverlodge italian...To me the Manitoba and the 2 Beaverlodge are what Canada has the best to offer in early tomatoes...
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Post by canadamike on Jul 7, 2015 14:27:14 GMT -5
Tis is not ''treching tech''but very valuable research, in 2008, through me, HG coordinated the dispersion around the world ( mostly Europe) in collaboration with Kokopelli from France of Tim Peters perennial wheat and rye, the idea being having different people from different climates select themselves for what they want, making it better for bread being of importance to many while others went for forage.
Shattering, natural with wild rye, was a problem, but over time can be resolved like it was probably in wheat as we all know by now since we grow lots of it to make bread.
I do not have space for that anymore, but if I did and had a couple of animals to feed, it would be a no brainer for me. If it is not good for bread it will be amazing for the animals.
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Post by canadamike on Feb 20, 2015 23:55:17 GMT -5
Shit...I am coming back here after many years, life too busy, I used to post like hell....I am in Canada, Quebec now ( it used to be Ontario but very close to Quebec)...and have grown lots of tomatoes, about a few hundreds cultivars per year. Except for the last 3 years, where it was about 20...my life changed,I moved.STUPICE and BLOODY BUTCHER are always fighting for first tomato, with others like Glacier, Manitoba, Précocibec and a few other suppposedly hyper early canadian bred tomatoes...mostly worth shit if you want my ten cents on it, but Stupice is OK....Bloody Butcher, on the other end, is of gastonomical quality. The best canned tomatoes I ever made were BB.
Principe Borghese is also pretty early, about one week later here, but amazingly productive. It really kiks off mass producing a few weeks after Bloody, but Bloody BUtcher and Stupice keep on pumping out tomatoes until frost. BB keeps being the best tasting all the time.
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Post by canadamike on Apr 20, 2014 19:28:29 GMT -5
In the GRIN genebank, there are lots of pumpin like moschatas, mostly wildish types, most of them are not butternut looking, a type evidently selected from buttoning to get more flesh...as for the size, dunno, but I get lots of smallish ones at the end of the season LOL!!
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Post by canadamike on Apr 20, 2014 19:16:20 GMT -5
I would suggest you select your mothers well and harvest from the most desirable ones, the ones with the most qualities you desire. Planting them close to daddies with good characteristics is very very far from certainty, but in mass planting it could help direct...the bees LOL!! Just help, not garantee the results...early Canada and Oranglo, a relatively early and good producer even up here, looks like a winning cross to me, I do not have time to do it now but it has been in my mind for years...for watermelons.
Gnadenfled and Charentais sounds very very sexy...again, since it is mass crossing, to increase chance, whatever your ideal combinations are, plant them side by side away from the others to help the maths against the bees...
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Post by canadamike on Apr 20, 2014 18:51:16 GMT -5
I would strongly recommend, on top of Noir Des Carmes, VÉDRANTAIS, a true type of Charentais that I find, as a canadian, better here than Charantais, way earlier and more productive, like a modern hybrid really. In 2010, it went trough hell, cold treatment at seedling stage, even got covered in snow in April like my 200 cultivars at the 2 leaf stage in its 2 inches pot, then went through the worst drought in 50 years, temps went up to 114 F here ( in the shadow), no water or rain, plus a severe crisis of powdery mildew where I lost most of the melons that had not already died from the harsh spring treatment ...about 20 out of 200 were surviving at this point, but Védrantais , one single vine, gave me 5 beautiful melons, and after that heat wave, we got 380% of the usual August rain, so it met cold, drought, heat, powdery mildew ( it was covered like all others) then cold and rain..and it gave me delicious sweet melons.
Most of the melons I harvested were tasteless, ripening in endless rain, but not him...and a few others...
Lunéville wouls also be a good choice IF it ripens without huge rains, it is extremely cold resistant, and heat too, but so powerfull it will grow tasteless giants in very heavy rain. It is a son of Noir Des Carmes and Prescott.
On the non cantaloupe but with a cantaloupe taste ( at least here) I would recommend GNADENFLED, a netted melond, definitely not a cantaloupe, but with a taste that is here quite european. It grows well in the canadian prairies with their short summers, grows ( I think) even better here... I am not too much a fan of the musky taste...and I love it. But terroir has an impact on taste, it is not only true for grapes and wine...
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Post by canadamike on Jan 25, 2014 20:34:17 GMT -5
Genetics for squashes are not that great for frost or super cold resistance. We have to work a bit to help. Seaweed will help a lot by having its auxins increase the thickness of the cell walls, hence rigidity and resistance to frost, but of course only to a minimal degree. The combination of thicker cell walls with triacanthanol, a powerful growth hormone that is also a fatty alcool and protect plants against cold and, also to a minimla extent, frost...
We all know that squashes will not survive minus 5 but around 32 F, triacontanol and auxins will help a lot. For triacontanol, just get alfalfa meal... a couple of shovelfuls per plant will also give the hell of a boost to production. BTW, if your lawn is suffering in the summer,start in the spring with alfalfa meal.
Here, I used to write in a local newspaper while I was living in Ontario. I started the thing 5 years ago, and they are selling tons, litterally, of alfalfa meal for lawns. You get the first green lawn in the spring and the last one green in December, still green while other lawns are brown...
I had fun a few years ago, I made drawing with alfalfa meal on my neighbour's grass, he was laughing at me with my alfalfa...
He spent the fall mowing like an idiot because, amongst other things, one of the drawings beside the smileys was a word...IDIOT...lol
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Post by canadamike on Jan 25, 2014 19:34:01 GMT -5
I much prefer moschatas when it comes to summer squash, nuttier flavour...but I think we all have to admit that for this purpose they are not very productive.Poor fruit set?? Is there a common thing that happened in your neck of the woods in the last years, like very cold nights, droughts....
To other crops the usual first answer is too much nitrogen, it makes leaves and leaves and leaves, but it is sooooo rarely the case with cucurbits. Since we tend to be mostly organic around this forum, I doubt that there is a need for more phosphorus, manure and compost usually do the job very well...but phosphorus deficiency is the first thing to look at, even if it is only to conclude that there is none...
I suspect environmental stress, you should try to foliar spray with seaweed a lot.
We had severe drought here last summer. I worked with 2 cucumber farmers, one of them in a research and development project, the other one, his team mate ( frenchie writing in english here) having done the R and D in the previous years.
I have created a seaweed based complex, with other organic ingredients, and in the farm where it was tested ( in trials), cukes and squashes performed beautifully despite the drought.
At the other farm, much smaller with only 45 acres of cukes, the R&D had been done, the guy went full scale seaweed. They were partners in a cannery contract with another guy.
The buddy only doing R&D failed to achieve his share of the contract, the other one too »(I do not know him) and the third, now in full swing with foliar seaweed spraying got, in the same drought, «I repeat, in the same drought, 800 tons of cukes, his share of the contract was for 500....
So,a 60% increase over average in a year where others where at 70% of normal production or so....
Same region, buddys, neighbours, and very different fate...
Start looking at unlocking the genetics of your plants with seaweed my friend...
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Post by canadamike on Oct 27, 2013 22:10:18 GMT -5
One should graft potato tops on tomato roots to produce billions of TPS That is, actually a sure way to get lots of flowers from potato plants.... As for the graft of tomatoes on potatoes, it is a very very easy one to make as opposed to what they say, but I doubt very very much that such a number of potatoes could be produced as in the picture, it did not work for me anyway. The plant either spends energy underground or above ground to flower... I guess they tricked the picture or simply waited for the potato plant to produce tubers before doing the graft.
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Post by canadamike on Oct 27, 2013 18:39:58 GMT -5
One should graft potato tops on tomato roots to produce billions of TPS That is, actually a sure way to get lots of flowers from potato plants.... As for the graft of tomatoes on potatoes, it is a very very easy one to make as opposed to what they say, but I doubt very very much that such a number of potatoes could be produced as in the picture, it did not work for me anyway. The plant either spends energy underground or above ground to flower... I guess they tricked the picture or simply waited for the potato plant to produce tubers before doing the graft.
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Post by canadamike on Oct 25, 2013 23:44:57 GMT -5
I sus^pect something went wrong environmentaly speaking, maybe a combination of thinks like lots of water and cold nights.
I tend to prefer Romano beans large and flat and ho so sweet and juicy, but I also love RED SWAN, by far my favorite canning bean. I know work in pure sans and I feel it has a negative impact on bean taste compared to the more clayish soil I had before
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Post by canadamike on Oct 25, 2013 23:14:23 GMT -5
There is more than one topic in that discussion.....we know know that modern high yielding cultivars ( also shorter) have a very high content of gliadine-A, one of many molecules that are in the complex make up of gluten. This one seems to be the culprit. BUt, as far as sensitivities go, it has now been proven in a few studies that children starting their ''gluten consumming life'' with older wheats bread etc...also containing some gliadine-a but much much less, tend to be more OK later on. As for why we as humans are more sensitive....I guess we all agree on environmental factors. The nutrient content is another topic. Soil is almost dead on most of our modern agricultural acreage....and since glyphosates are so popular, it will be like that for a long long time. These glyphosates, once in the ground, resume the life they were planned for before MOnsanto and all added adjuvants to them that made them become weed killers: they were created as chelating agents, and that is exactly what they do in the soil: they chelate ( read lock up) minerals in the soil. They can show up in the soil analysis but they are rendered unavailable to the plants, hence mineral deficit in grains. This is different from gliadine-a, but still very saddening. These mineral deficiencies are also creating serious fungal problems. Grains grown for human ( and also animal btw) consumption now have serious problems with phytotoxins...thanks to the lack of minerals...weak plants are a smorgasborg for fungal and bacterial diseases...
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Post by canadamike on Oct 25, 2013 21:58:34 GMT -5
I have grown potatoes from slips many times, I do it to get more taters, others regrow from the tubers, but they were always smaller, I always had the opposite effect. I do not think one time is conclusive at all. Even my experience is not: it was from small slips from very small tubers, far from big ones.
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Post by canadamike on Oct 25, 2013 21:30:26 GMT -5
Great to see you, Michel! Sounds like you're on to something. Wishing you the best. Thanks...great to hear from you too....and hello to all the friends
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Post by canadamike on Oct 22, 2013 12:07:27 GMT -5
Rowan...I do the same too in my sand. True, it is pricey. To cut on your costs, I recommend you split the seaweed 50/50 with alfalfa meal. There will be plenty of seaweed hormons in the soil and you are going to add some triacontanol to the mix, anothr powerful hormone that is also a fatty alcool. Once in the plants, it gives them some frost protection too. You get away with a few light frosts in tomatoes and squashes...
Dustdevil, there is no fermented seaweed on the market in the USA yet, I am working with some people and Tom Wagner to introduce a ''Tom Wagner'' tomato and garden booster mix. The seaweed is the base, but many other organic things are in the mix. They greatly potentialize the effects. But I am not at liberty to discuss that...Use the seaweed you have, even better get a seaweed and fish emulsion mix, although beans are kind of ok with good compost and foliar seaweed only. Add a lil yucca ( 2%) and spray every week. If you do it twice a week, your garden will frighten people LOL!! I have a friend, a restaurant owner, that has done that this summer in the ''demo'' garden behind the restaurant, using my mix and it became the talk of the village. His tomatoes outgrew his wooden posts, he put bigger new ones, they later broke under the weight of the tomatoes. His testimony is on my FB page...as for the cukes, he let the villagers come and pick them, he had way too many...
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