“Hybrid Heirloom Awakening”

[Alan]

I agree about Amish marketing.


Here we have 4 sects of amish, all seprerate, all unique, and yet only one of those sects, the swiss, even comes close to resembling what we are "sold" as Amish, to boot, they are the only local ones I do business and trade with. Good people for sure.

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

I hope i haven't stirred up the hornets nest over at the Seed Savers Forum, but i just revived the thread which is mentioned in this thread. Here is the comment i left for those interested:

This is an idea im interested in. I think using heirlooms to create "hybrid heirlooms" and then saving the seed through several generations until one get a new variety with the heirloom ancestry is great.

I would like to try this with two squash i'm going to try and grow this year. One is an old heirloom hopi squash and the other is a wild squash from the utah desert. I'm not so much interested in the F1 generation, because all the offspring will be the same, but the F2 is where the interesting phenotypes will show themselves. I think by using old heirlooms and allowing them to cross gives plants enough heterogeneousness to be able to start adapting to local climate conditions.

I like heirlooms very well, and some are great just as they are. But some are highly inbred or not adapted to my climate, and that means that i can't grow them (even if they have superior flavor). The biggest problem with both heirlooms AND commercially produced hybrids is that they are not grown in my climate conditions and when they are shipped out here and planted they often die or grow poorly. This means that i am having to breed my own varieties.

I too dislike the phrase "open pollinated" because in it's literal sense it means pollinated by the bees and may produce lots of natural F1 crosses. But the current use of the term is used to describe highly inbred lines with stability. I'm not going to be able to change this usage of the term any time soon, but i wanted to mention it briefly.

Anyway, thats my take on this idea.