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Post by hortusbrambonii on Dec 28, 2012 3:56:27 GMT -5
I have 25 seeds of some chards called 'swiss five color silverbeet' or something like that, which should be a combination of several colors. I suppose that's not enough as a gene pool for seedsaving if I like the variation?
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Post by cortona on Dec 28, 2012 4:03:56 GMT -5
being usually the 5 colors grown in isolation and just mixed in the packet i think you can have enough variability to mantain a population but you can add more diversity the secon or third year
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Dec 28, 2012 6:10:13 GMT -5
In my experience, the gain to be had by saving seeds from locally adapted plants far outweighs any loss that might be attributable to inbreeding depression. I tend to think of inbreeding depression as a pretend problem made-up by the seed companies in an attempt to scare us into buying fresh seeds every year. It's not something that I am able to observe in my garden.
You are more likely to get hybrid-vigor because of the 5 cultivars hybridizing with each other. That vigor will last for many generations even with a small population of crossing cultivars. You can do simple things to make the population much larger. Chard seed is highly viable for many years, so plant a little bit of 2 year old seed, and 3 year old seed, and 4 year old seed, and swap seeds with your family and neighbors, and add a new cultivar to the population every 5 years. And save seeds from plants with different phenotypes.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Dec 28, 2012 6:47:20 GMT -5
Go ahead and save some seed and see what happens. I was reading the blog of one of my favorite seed companies (Osborne) and they had some interesting stuff to say about rainbow chard mixes. It appears that some mixes are single seed lots with multiple colors and others are combined lots with each color being a distinct variety. Since Osborne has the most amazing selection of chard of any seed house I'm aware of, I trust their information on this. "Open-pollinated Swiss chard mixes have different colors within one aggregate seed. Formula mixes are single colors per aggregate seed, as long as the variety lines are clean. The benefit of the multiple colors per aggregate is that you do not have to travel so much ground to access all the colors, we found this to be very important when bunching...we were faster and our bunches were more balanced." vegtrials.blogspot.com/2012/10/swiss-chard-mixes-compared.html |
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Post by hortusbrambonii on Dec 28, 2012 7:05:02 GMT -5
Thanks for that link!
Interesting, so it could be either a multicolored open-pollinated type with a lot of variation even in one seed-cluster (which'I forgot here, 25 seed clusters will give much more plants than 25 if I transplanted them instead of thinning them out) or 5 different varieties that should give enough variation for an interesting gene pool...
Makin an own adapted semi-landrace, even if it's in my small garden, and adding new varieties every time I grow them would be a good idea. What's the minimum population you need for saving seed of B. vulgaris? I suppose they are wind-pollinating cross-pollinators and therefor need a lot of specimens?
It's only the second year that they flower, and it isn't even sowing time, so we'll see what happens when it happens...
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Post by ferdzy on Dec 28, 2012 8:11:50 GMT -5
Oxbow, thanks for that link! Looks like hours of reading...
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Post by cortona on Jan 2, 2013 12:41:02 GMT -5
oxbow, wath a beauty, i've tryed to buy seeds from this seed company but..they dont sell to customer that live in eu, really sad! they have greath kale too! and really really good fivecolor beet!
somebody plan to buy from this compani that can buy for me and then send the seeds here?
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