Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Oct 7, 2011 1:31:43 GMT -5
Here's a short summary of my breeding projects for this year.
How about yours?
Turnips: Purple top, white globe. I have grown 4 generations of plants in my garden. (2 seed crops) I produced one pint of seed this summer, and grew a glorious crop of turnips as a fall crop. They are currently about 5" in diameter; still sweet and tender.
Acorn squash: Planted a 60 foot row of seeds from Homegrown goodness and the Long Island Seed project and other places. Harvested 6 fruits.
Argyrosperma squash: No fruits produced.
Lagenaria gourd: No fruits produced. Vine length reached about a foot.
Birdhouse/Bottle lagenaria gourd: Some plants produced semi-mature fruits.
Crookneck, Zucchini: Wish me luck. My first year growing seed for them in semi-isolation. We'll see next year how much cross pollination happened.
Pepo Gourds: Grew a great crop with lots of diversity. Photos coming.
Okra: One plant out of ~150 seeds grew to about 18" tall and produced a few fruits that might contain viable seeds.
Sweet Peppers: I'm very content with my current landrace. The large bells don't ripen in my short growing season, so this year I added some baby peppers (jalepeno shaped) that ripen to red and orange. I also grow some yellow banana/bell types for color during the early season. I have eliminated all of the giant bells from the gene pool. They are just too prone to rotting. Photos taken.
Tomatoes: Trialed about a hundred varieties this summer. Most of them did much worse than my previous landrace. Discovered the earliest tomato ever. Two tomatoes from the Homegrown goodness landraces made it into my early season slicing tomato landrace. Those same two also made it into the main season landrace. One cherry tomato from the Johno landrace made it into the early cherry tomato landrace. The rest were too long season. The sewer tomatoes were a disaster: tough, and bad tasting. YUCK!
Snap Beans: Did fine. I didn't pick any for eating, saved them all for seed. Gotta taste every plant next season. I let at least one leathery bean get through this year.
Cantaloupes: Covered elsewhere. Very pleased. Harvested around 14 bushels!!!
Watermelon: 5 fruits harvested out of ~600 seeds planted. Looking good.
True Potato Seeds: All seedlings died this spring. Intending to junk 95% of the program and start over using only male-fertile clones and seeds.
Shelling peas: Grew fine. Identified a few plants that were about 10 days earlier than the rest. Sorted them out into a new landrace.
Red pea: pollinated a yellow snow pea with a purple snap pea. It's still a bit immature. Covered with a bucket to protect from cold.
Purple pea: grew out a generation of kapuler's purple snap pea and selected for purple pods.
Green snap peas: Guess I aught to go harvest seeds. Separate them from the snow peas.
Lettuce: Did fine, except that I should have marked the plants before they matured. I lost track of which plant had which characteristics that I want.
Carrots: My second generation grew great for me. Too bad that most of them are male sterile.
Onions: Maybe next year I'll get it right... I can grow seed just fine, don't know how to use it right.
Moschata: Grew great. I planted many different isolated patches. I need to dig out my records to see which is which. Took photos to share, and some of long-necked squash that shouldn't be shared. Got a few that look like hybrids between dickinson pumpkins and long-necked squash. Excited about the possibility of transferring the deep orange color of the dickinson into a butternut.
Radishes: Grew a lot of nice seed, but didn't get the fall crop planted in time to see how it's going to turn out.
Spinach: Planting many varieties side by side made it trivial to select for those that do well in my garden.
Parsnips:Kral russian, turnip shaped. Didn't germinate very well, or grow very vigorously, but produced easy to dig roots. Planted a seed crop for next year.
Wheat: Separated into two landraces: Tall and short. Perhaps that translates to wheat and rye. Looking forward to having some down time this winter to look at them more closely.
Cucumbers: Not yet harvested. Ending up with mostly Marketmore types.
Beets: Transplanting roots in a week or two to start a landrace.
Garlic landrace: Went into last fall with about 20 varieties. Most of the hard-necked varieties got eliminated during the growing season. Added about another 20 varieties this fall.
Elephant Garlic: Produced less food than what was planted. Dropped from consideration.
Sweet corn: Segregating Indian corn X se+ crosses. Selecting AD for better adaptability to my farm. Growing out open pollinated se+ patch. Details posted elsewhere.
Small early Maxima. Produced lots of 8 oz fruits. Wishing they were closer to a pound or two. Not very prolific. F1 grown out of a cross with buttercup. Hoping that a larger fruited (but still early) version will emerge in the F2.
Banana squash. Selected some nice fruits for next year's crop.
Eggplant: saved seeds from the best growing plant. (Small light purple fruits)
Jalapeno: I forgot to mark a plant and a helper picked all the fruits.
Lemon Cucumber: Found a variety that survived powdery mildew.... (Don't know if we had an attack this summer, but it survived anyway.)
Sunroots: Grew a crop from seed. The seed heads are fertile.
Huauzontle: cut it off before it produced seeds. I really didn't want it hybridizing with one of my most prolific weeds.
Broccoli: Abandoning my efforts. Going to start over with non-hybrid seed.
Chives: What's to select? They grow fine, and produce seeds fine. There are differences in individuals, but I haven't been doing any selection other than must survive the winter, and must produce seed.
Day Neutral Strawberries: Planted about 6 varieties. Haven't done any selection yet. Intending to start a new row this fall.
Popcorn: Best crop ever! The F3 generation is always such a happy time for crops in my garden.
How about yours?
Turnips: Purple top, white globe. I have grown 4 generations of plants in my garden. (2 seed crops) I produced one pint of seed this summer, and grew a glorious crop of turnips as a fall crop. They are currently about 5" in diameter; still sweet and tender.
Acorn squash: Planted a 60 foot row of seeds from Homegrown goodness and the Long Island Seed project and other places. Harvested 6 fruits.
Argyrosperma squash: No fruits produced.
Lagenaria gourd: No fruits produced. Vine length reached about a foot.
Birdhouse/Bottle lagenaria gourd: Some plants produced semi-mature fruits.
Crookneck, Zucchini: Wish me luck. My first year growing seed for them in semi-isolation. We'll see next year how much cross pollination happened.
Pepo Gourds: Grew a great crop with lots of diversity. Photos coming.
Okra: One plant out of ~150 seeds grew to about 18" tall and produced a few fruits that might contain viable seeds.
Sweet Peppers: I'm very content with my current landrace. The large bells don't ripen in my short growing season, so this year I added some baby peppers (jalepeno shaped) that ripen to red and orange. I also grow some yellow banana/bell types for color during the early season. I have eliminated all of the giant bells from the gene pool. They are just too prone to rotting. Photos taken.
Tomatoes: Trialed about a hundred varieties this summer. Most of them did much worse than my previous landrace. Discovered the earliest tomato ever. Two tomatoes from the Homegrown goodness landraces made it into my early season slicing tomato landrace. Those same two also made it into the main season landrace. One cherry tomato from the Johno landrace made it into the early cherry tomato landrace. The rest were too long season. The sewer tomatoes were a disaster: tough, and bad tasting. YUCK!
Snap Beans: Did fine. I didn't pick any for eating, saved them all for seed. Gotta taste every plant next season. I let at least one leathery bean get through this year.
Cantaloupes: Covered elsewhere. Very pleased. Harvested around 14 bushels!!!
Watermelon: 5 fruits harvested out of ~600 seeds planted. Looking good.
True Potato Seeds: All seedlings died this spring. Intending to junk 95% of the program and start over using only male-fertile clones and seeds.
Shelling peas: Grew fine. Identified a few plants that were about 10 days earlier than the rest. Sorted them out into a new landrace.
Red pea: pollinated a yellow snow pea with a purple snap pea. It's still a bit immature. Covered with a bucket to protect from cold.
Purple pea: grew out a generation of kapuler's purple snap pea and selected for purple pods.
Green snap peas: Guess I aught to go harvest seeds. Separate them from the snow peas.
Lettuce: Did fine, except that I should have marked the plants before they matured. I lost track of which plant had which characteristics that I want.
Carrots: My second generation grew great for me. Too bad that most of them are male sterile.
Onions: Maybe next year I'll get it right... I can grow seed just fine, don't know how to use it right.
Moschata: Grew great. I planted many different isolated patches. I need to dig out my records to see which is which. Took photos to share, and some of long-necked squash that shouldn't be shared. Got a few that look like hybrids between dickinson pumpkins and long-necked squash. Excited about the possibility of transferring the deep orange color of the dickinson into a butternut.
Radishes: Grew a lot of nice seed, but didn't get the fall crop planted in time to see how it's going to turn out.
Spinach: Planting many varieties side by side made it trivial to select for those that do well in my garden.
Parsnips:Kral russian, turnip shaped. Didn't germinate very well, or grow very vigorously, but produced easy to dig roots. Planted a seed crop for next year.
Wheat: Separated into two landraces: Tall and short. Perhaps that translates to wheat and rye. Looking forward to having some down time this winter to look at them more closely.
Cucumbers: Not yet harvested. Ending up with mostly Marketmore types.
Beets: Transplanting roots in a week or two to start a landrace.
Garlic landrace: Went into last fall with about 20 varieties. Most of the hard-necked varieties got eliminated during the growing season. Added about another 20 varieties this fall.
Elephant Garlic: Produced less food than what was planted. Dropped from consideration.
Sweet corn: Segregating Indian corn X se+ crosses. Selecting AD for better adaptability to my farm. Growing out open pollinated se+ patch. Details posted elsewhere.
Small early Maxima. Produced lots of 8 oz fruits. Wishing they were closer to a pound or two. Not very prolific. F1 grown out of a cross with buttercup. Hoping that a larger fruited (but still early) version will emerge in the F2.
Banana squash. Selected some nice fruits for next year's crop.
Eggplant: saved seeds from the best growing plant. (Small light purple fruits)
Jalapeno: I forgot to mark a plant and a helper picked all the fruits.
Lemon Cucumber: Found a variety that survived powdery mildew.... (Don't know if we had an attack this summer, but it survived anyway.)
Sunroots: Grew a crop from seed. The seed heads are fertile.
Huauzontle: cut it off before it produced seeds. I really didn't want it hybridizing with one of my most prolific weeds.
Broccoli: Abandoning my efforts. Going to start over with non-hybrid seed.
Chives: What's to select? They grow fine, and produce seeds fine. There are differences in individuals, but I haven't been doing any selection other than must survive the winter, and must produce seed.
Day Neutral Strawberries: Planted about 6 varieties. Haven't done any selection yet. Intending to start a new row this fall.
Popcorn: Best crop ever! The F3 generation is always such a happy time for crops in my garden.
They were early. 