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Post by nicollas on Jan 7, 2014 3:13:55 GMT -5
blueadzuki: you should definitely open a thread about your great discoveries, people here would be very interested i guess (have you any pics ?). To return to Phaseolus polystachios, i put the seeds to stratification as i guess it needs it cause its a cold hardy perennial specy.
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Post by trixtrax on Jan 7, 2014 4:46:56 GMT -5
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Post by blueadzuki on Jan 7, 2014 7:00:06 GMT -5
Well, I techically DO make mention of anything interesting I find somewhere here, though I can see the point of making a single thread to post all of them for ease of discovery (I'd make a blog of it, but I'm not good at computers and don't know how to blog). Pictures, however are probably not coming any time soon. Most of those "wild" seeds I find are very small, too small for either my phone camera or scanner to take a good clear pic of. And digital cameras that have that level of resolution tend to be only the kinds of models used by professional photogrophers, which are too expensive for me (actually at the moment money is tight enough that ANY camera would be too expensive for me, but those would be WAY out of my range.)I'd take pictures of the plants I get, but that would not tell anyone much (plus not everything grows well, there are a lot of things I have yet to get one plant to term on.)I don't even HAVE the favas anymore, I only ever found two seeds of it (one of which was damaged and dead) and a critter ate the root off that one (though I do remember one odd thing about it, unlike the modern fava bean, that one was a climber.)
There IS a picture of the Minimus wheat up here somewhere, probably in the Poacae section (go to the archives and try and find a thread called something like "My one and only wheat head (or ear, forgot which I wrote it as).
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Post by ottawagardener on Jan 7, 2014 10:48:04 GMT -5
Oops, my mistake. They are selling an annual bean. Got my genus mixed up while searching.
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Post by cletus on Feb 11, 2014 1:36:45 GMT -5
Blueadzuki, is it mostly the aggressive roguing out of more wild crop genetics by farmers which leads to the loss of wild types? Instead of selecting semi cultivated types at the same time but a different patch like some traditional peoples? Is the habitat destruction associated with agriculture also a culprit? Your observations with those seeds sound really interesting, so there really is a blue adzuki?
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Post by blueadzuki on Feb 11, 2014 12:02:58 GMT -5
I'm going entirely on my own assumptions here (it's not like I have any outside corroboration) But the answer is, probably. If you are trying to selectively breed a crop, at some point the presence of wild material in your fields can become a liability. Yes the wild material can allow you to put useful genes back in, but it also can put genes back in you DON'T want, like say, ones that make your crop shatter at maturity or make it taste bad, or even be slightly poisonous. There are also comsmetic questions, the bigger, nicer and purer your crop looks, the better a price you'll probaby get for the stuff you are selling.
The "keep a spot of old stuff, just in case" isn't always an option for farmers. Somce crops (like corn) spread thier pollen too far afield to allow the average subsitence farmer with his little patch of earth the space to put both on and not have to worry about cross contamination. And there is the matter of the yield sacrafice that doing that can entail. Remember that land you put over to the old one is land you AREN'T planting with the new stuff. Long term, having that backup sounds like a good idea, sice it brings some added crop stability, but that stability can come at a cost in terms of your short term yield. For someone whose land is productive enough that thier land can be put at less than absolute maximum theoretical yield and they will still be OK vis a vis feeding themselves and thier families, that's probably fine, but if your land is so poor to begin with, or you have so little (or you're growing a cash crop where you have to sell it in order to buy the food you need)that you have no wiggle room crop wise (you get absolute maximum or you starve)sacrificing some of your space to backup may be a luxury you decide you can't afford.)
As for habitat destruction, well it depends on the crop. A lot of the wild ancestors of our modern crops are from pretty tough areas and so are pretty good survivors. Wild wheat is a meadow grass, favas presumaby started out as another climbing vetch, cabbage orignally was a plant of seaside rocks. If the alteration of the enviroment to make it ag suitable does not really change much for the plants environment (think of how many weeds thrive in "disturbed ground") then they might hang on, unless actively removed (which they might be, see area above.)
Yes, there are blue adzuki beans, for a given value of "blue".Adzuki beans are more or less on the same color palette as thier close cousin, the rice bean. the color basically goes in two layers which might be describable as the "base coat" and the "overcoat".
The base coat is usually a solid color, in the commonest varieties, this base color is some shade of red (from a pink hotdog color down to a deep garnet maroon, depending on type.) but there are others possible. There is a wide selection of tans, ranging from a "white" (actually a pale cream) down through buff, tan, brown and finally something visually black (you also can get black at the far end of the reds) There are also a few shades of green possible (different from those of the mung bean) and a pinto (white/buff with red patches) though that is very rare.
The overcoat on a normal industry adzuki is clear (that is it adds no addional color. But it can have mottling just like it's wild ancestor V. radiatia nakisihme (which is normally a mottled brown) this mottling is actually a deep purple, but depending on the base color, can look purplish,bluish,or black. On some beans this mottling can become so thick it actually covers the whole surface, creating a "wash"
"Blue" requires a combination of two fairly rare types. To get "Blue" you have to have a bean that has a pale green base coat and a full "wash" overcoat. the green under the purple causes a color that visually appears blue.
Adzuki's are an excellent example of those selection pressures I mentioned at the beginning (what I usually refer to as bioteleology). There is a HUGE cultural selection pressure for flat red in Asia (i.e. where most of the adzkui breeding took place.) Given the huge cultural bias for the color red (i.e. the lucky color) most people want thier adzuki's as red as possible. There is also the fact that the vast majority of adzuki's in China are used to make thing like An (sweet red bean paste) when culturally, a big selling point of sweet red bean paste is that it is red, selling adzuki's whose paste will NOT be red, and often will be rather ugly colors (most of the others turn varing shades of muddy brown when mashed. At least I think they would, as yet I don't have enough spares of anything to cook any!) your crop probably won't get as good a price. Add on that a lot of the non red strains are rather small for adzuki's (a consequence of not having the same amount of selection for big seeds as the reds have) and you have a large bias for staying with red and red alone (it's a bit like that soybean I was so fond of for soy milk. No matter how much I liked the taste, I knew it's commercial appeal would be limited, since few people would be interested in drinking green soymilk!)
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Post by cletus on Feb 13, 2014 15:21:01 GMT -5
Thats really interesting and makes sense. I wonder if dominance of wild types over cultivated genetics is also a factor. There may be general differences in interspecifc vs. intraspecifc crossing in that regard. Michurin, working mainly with perennial fruiters, noticed that in general crossing a developed cultivar with a wild species resulted in the wild genetics pretty much unilaterally dominating the hybrids.
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Post by blueadzuki on Feb 13, 2014 15:50:16 GMT -5
Well, by and large, the wild genes and the domestic ones are often diametrically opposite with regards to desirability. That is those things that we would consider "bad" for the plant as a crop are exactly the same ones the plant would consider "good" if it was in the wild (and sentient). From the plant p.o.v. most of the stuff we try and breed out is exactly what it would want. It makes SENSE for a plant to have pods that snap open and fling seed when they are done; it means you seed gets spread farther. Having a dark seed coat with mottling means your seed is better camouflaged on the ground (I sometime splay around with field peas that still have the "M" gene that gives them marmorated (mottled) seed coats, and I can testify that, if you drop one of those peas on dusty ground, you can have a real problem seeing it again; against the dust and sun it look just like a dirt clod. Tasting bad and being a little poisonous helps you to cut down on damage by pests (and if the poison is a purgative kind, may mean the animal that just ate the seed will vomit or poop it up after they have softened the seed coat, but before the digest the good part (and leave the seed in a nice patch of fertilizer in the process)And so on. If our plants and animals could think, they probably would regard our breeding efforts as being a form of genetic crippling of incredible cruelty. To us humans, a breeder of a new strain may be considered a modern Luther Burbank; to the plant itself, he's Joseph Mengele.
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Feb 13, 2014 22:12:57 GMT -5
I often wonder: "Which is being taken advantage of?"
Are humans taking advantage of corn? Or is corn manipulating and taking advantage of humans. Genetically it seems to me that Zea mays has a more robust reproduction strategy than any of the closely related teosintes. I had red raspberry leaf tea today so I gotta wonder even further if corn is part of the human genome.... We are so closely intertwined.
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Post by DarJones on Feb 13, 2014 22:39:31 GMT -5
It is called an ecosystem for good reason. All parts are intertwined and interdependent.
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Post by steev on Feb 13, 2014 23:08:15 GMT -5
Intersupportive, too!
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Post by blueadzuki on Feb 14, 2014 7:57:18 GMT -5
I often wonder: "Which is being taken advantage of?" Are humans taking advantage of corn? Or is corn manipulating and taking advantage of humans. Genetically it seems to me that Zea mays has a more robust reproduction strategy than any of the closely related teosintes. I had red raspberry leaf tea today so I gotta wonder even further if corn is part of the human genome.... We are so closely intertwined. It might be so, but it seems to me that, in the case of someting like corn, if it is the one taking advantage, it's done it to a pretty dangerous level. It's reached a point where it CAN'T reliably spread itself without our intervention; a corn cob that is never touched by a human is pretty much destined to have all (or nearly all) of its kernels be eaten by animals while still attached, go moldy, or germinte still on the cob and die from lack of growing space. Corn has reached the dangerous level of dependence where the intervention of the other creature has gone from "beneficial" to "essential". We go bye-bye; corn goes bye-bye. It's stratagy has put it in the class of plants like the Kentucky Coffee Tree,the Guanacaste, and(to a lesser exent) the dodo tree and the honey locust; plant that threw in thier lots with thier disperers of choice so hard that, in thier absence, and minus human intervention, they are really struggling. |
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Post by msluki on Apr 20, 2015 13:57:08 GMT -5
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Post by reed on May 17, 2016 10:35:45 GMT -5
khoomeizhi, sent me some seeds in a trade awhile back. Don't see anything yet from the ones I planted around edges of the yard but have 8 very nice looking young plants in the cold frame. Now to decide where to put them. Thinking I'll make permanent trellises in each of the gardens so they are near other other beans and maybe someday I'll find a hybrid with runners or limas. I didn't do any stratification or anything, just planted them when I started the tomatoes.
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