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Post by reed on Jul 25, 2018 6:04:25 GMT -5
I haven't done a good job on the curing part. I'v been pushing harvest back till almost frost to maximize seed collection and then I'm out of hot weather for curing. This year I have a seed planting and a dedicated production planting but if the production plot is seeding good I'll probably still delay the harvest.
Growing in pots it is possible to dig them without breaking the tips off the ends of the roots. Only a couple years observation but looks like if they have an inch or two sticking out on the ends, that is where the slips form rather than off the big part of the root and they keep making more as you remove the bigger ones. Also again from limited observation those with the small roots sticking out make slips much sooner than those without.
I have a couple right now from last years harvest that still look fine even though they have made lots of slips. It makes sense that they have to be degraded from feeding all the slips that have grown from them but you can't tell by looking.
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Post by farmermike on Jul 31, 2018 17:52:07 GMT -5
Well, my plant with the green lobed leaves turned out to be the first to flower and the first to start making seed pods.  Some plants seem to have pale green seed pods. This one has purple. About 1/3 of my 15 seed grown sweet potato plants are blooming profusely. 3 plants are beginning to form pods. A few of my commercial or heirloom clones are starting to form flower buds too. I'm very interested in crossing those with the seed grown plants, in order to combine their seediness with the purple and orange roots. reed, at what point would you harvest the pods so that they don't shatter and drop their seeds? The one on the left in my photo is the oldest pod (and the blurriest). This is currently my most exciting breeding project! |
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Post by reed on Aug 1, 2018 4:42:42 GMT -5
Well, my plant with the green lobed leaves turned out to be the first to flower and the first to start making seed pods. A few of my commercial or heirloom clones are starting to form flower buds too. I'm very interested in crossing those with the seed grown plants, in order to combine their seediness with the purple and orange roots. reed , at what point would you harvest the pods so that they don't shatter and drop their seeds? The one on the left in my photo is the oldest pod (and the blurriest). This is currently my most exciting breeding project! My first one this year is descended from last year's first sprout / first seed and it is this years first sprout / first seed. I'm very curious to see what the roots on your green lobed look like. I wonder if there will be a correlation with root color, maybe purple skin orange inside, that would be really cool. How easily they shatter varies from plant to plant, you will just need to watch the first capsules closely to see which ones do what. Ideally I like them to be totally dry, including the stem before harvesting the seed. Otherwise the seeds are larger and brown colored and when they dry they wrinkle up a little. They still seem to sprout but I like the look of the fully mature black seeds better. Here is a pic of some variation in drying. The one on the right is perfect, completely dry all they way, it yielded 4 nice black seeds. One on left with the base of the stem not dried had the larger brown seeds. Unless a plant shows tenancy to easily shatter I let them go till they look like the one on the right but after a while worrying over the state of a particular capsule is more trouble that its worth, you'll just go out each day and look for the mature ones.  That's exciting that you have some heirloom varieties also blooming. If you get a good amount of seed I would love to have some. Even if the heirlooms don't set seed themselves they might contribute pollen to the seed grown neighbors. Would really help me get new genetics without the trouble and expense of testing varieties that may or may not even bloom. Neither of the two clone varieties I have this year have offered a single bloom so far. Who do you have on pollination duty? In years past for me it has primarily been a particular type of small bumblebee. This year is way different. The larger bumblebees have taken interest as have the microbees and even some butterflies. Also a new to me even smaller bumblebee, they are nearly all black with just a little yellow. I'v never seen them before, they liked the tassels of the Zapalote Chico corn and now that it's goen they have moved to the sweet potatoes. O' I think I sent you some I pandaruta seed, did you start any of those? Mine didn't sprout, I'm guessing they might need cold stratification which I did not do. I have lots more seed so will do that for next year. I saw on an unrelated thread that there can be gene transfer through grafting. That's getting a little advanced for my skill level but thinking of giving it a try. I can easily stop and collect some pandurata stems and see what happens if I stick them on some sweet potato roots. |
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Post by imgrimmer on Aug 1, 2018 5:21:06 GMT -5
I have some seedlings from Sweden but again no flowers it is still the second year.
Summer is hot and dry different from the last years so there must be other reasons.
(I have 2 plots one with irrigation and one without)
I noticed sweetpotatoes suffer from drought. How much water do they need?
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Post by farmermike on Aug 1, 2018 11:37:25 GMT -5
reed, thanks for the seed pod photo. That is helpful. I should be able to start collecting seeds any day now. We still have a good 3 months of warm weather left, so hopefully I'll get a lot of seeds. Who do you have on pollination duty? In years past for me it has primarily been a particular type of small bumblebee. This year is way different. The larger bumblebees have taken interest as have the microbees and even some butterflies. Also a new to me even smaller bumblebee, they are nearly all black with just a little yellow. I'v never seen them before, they liked the tassels of the Zapalote Chico corn and now that it's goen they have moved to the sweet potatoes. O' I think I sent you some I pandaruta seed, did you start any of those? Mine didn't sprout, I'm guessing they might need cold stratification which I did not do. I have lots more seed so will do that for next year. I saw on an unrelated thread that there can be gene transfer through grafting. That's getting a little advanced for my skill level but thinking of giving it a try. I can easily stop and collect some pandurata stems and see what happens if I stick them on some sweet potato roots. At first I didn't see much pollinator interest. A bumble or carpenter bee would stop by a flower for a second then fly away. So, I started hand pollinating, which isn't too difficult. I just removed the corolla and the pistil from a flower on one plant, and swabbed the stamens into every open flower on different plants. But then I started to see honeybees visiting them.   Now every morning there are always a couple of honeybees in the sweet potato patch. They seem to be the perfect size to squeeze in there and capture pollen on their head and thorax, and then deposit it on the stigma of the next flower. I'm still doing occasional hand pollinations, just in case, but I'm not too worried about that anymore. I never got around to sowing the I. pandurata seeds this year, but that's good to know that they may need cold stratification. I'll plan to do that for next spring. That sounds like a really interesting plant to grow, even if crosses with sweet potato are not successful. Do you know if I. pandurata can be vegetatively propagated as well?
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Post by reed on Aug 2, 2018 5:37:28 GMT -5
farmermike, I have never seen a honey bee on mine and your honey bees look a little different than ours. Ours are a little lighter colored and have shorter fatter rear ends. imgrimmer, I don't have enough experience yet to say for sure about drought. I know they will wilt in hot weather, especially the ones with darker leaves but I'm still trying to figure out how it effects root and seed production. Dark colored ones will wilt in the afternoon even if watered earlier the same day so for now I'm being cautious and not watering too much, don't want to encourage rot or disease.
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Post by whwoz on Aug 2, 2018 19:13:10 GMT -5
New here and have only been growing Sweet potatoes for two years here in Southern Oz, (Roughly 1.5 hrs ESE of Melbourne Vic.). First year in sandy soil, last year in half IBC wicking beds (think 600lt self watering pot). We have a very limited range of Varieties available to us so I am thinking of doing some breeding some myself, would ask for seed but it appears that Sweet potato is not an allowed import while the likes of KangKong are. Go figure our customs, we can't. Re drought - our summers here are often long, hot and dry and as long as I kept some water in the wicking beds the plants grew well with no wilting, producing upto 3.5kg per plant (Beauregard). Bush Rats got into some of the PSWF (literally Purple Skin white flesh, some of our breeders are soooo imaginative) with the best of those that survived producing around 2.5kg. still got a lot of work on timing of planting and harvesting , setting up for slips etc to get right, but getting better.
A bit more detail on the wicking beds for those interested. Beds are approx 600mm high with 90mm PVC riser and loop in bottom. In the area surrounded by the PVC I have 90 to 100mm deep pots and gravel around them, covered by weed mat, with a layer of organic matter roughly 50 mm on top of this to aid the wicking action establishment. The rest is then filled in with 400 - 450mm of soil, watered once from the top to saturate and establish wicking then fill via riser when water level is low. Needs to have an over flow about 150mm above bottom of IBC incase one overfills or heavy rain.
Woz
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Post by richardw on Aug 3, 2018 0:15:01 GMT -5
Would be interesting to see if the clones you have over there produce flowers, all the New Zealand strains don't or rarely do. Shame your importation regulations are tight,
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Post by whwoz on Aug 3, 2018 1:08:06 GMT -5
Will be playing around a bit to see what happens, see if I can encourage a few to flower using some trellising to lift them up as has been suggested, also looking at getting the one or two ornamental varieties that are here as well. Doing something very similar to what Reed has done, in fact it will probably be based on his information here, seeing that he has had good success and hoping I can repeat that. Will keep you informed.
Woz
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Post by reed on Aug 6, 2018 3:51:06 GMT -5
Daily seed collection is underway now but plants are so intermingled with each other that except for a couple particular ones I have about gave up on trying to track and bag them separately. I had grand plans to keep them trellised up and more under control this year but failed pretty miserably on that. Some other matters have had me missing a collection day now and then so afraid I might miss some. Time to start cutting back, maybe even culling anything not blooming good in order to make the seeds easier to find.
Several of the later volunteers growing in the ground are also blooming but rabbits are attacking them as expected. I got a new roll of electric fence wire so should get that under control soon. I'm most interested, in seeing as how some of these came up two months later than the others if they have time to make usable sized roots.
Some plants have much longer vines than any of the original parents, I don't particularly like that but some are my favorite plants in other ways so nothing I can do about it. Interesting that traits show up that were not seen in the ancestors.
The new clone varieties that I hoped would mix in still have not bloomed. I'm thinking of moving them into much more shade to see if that helps. A new pale green ornamental the woman put in her flower pots by the shed has had a few flowers. I'v been hand pollinating it from mine but it hasn't set any seed.
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Post by reed on Aug 11, 2018 10:27:47 GMT -5
reed are all of the seeds from your collection from food varieties or are some from ornamental varieties? This year I'm seeing traits never observed in any of the parent varieties so I think about anything is possible. Because of that I'm just guessing that any with lobed leaves and or purple leaves are descended from the ornamental, one way or the other. I never kept exact track but most seeds I sent out last year were from plants that made food sized roots in 2016 or 17 with the rest from the 2015 back up. Still, I imagine at least some will revert to the stringy roots. I say food sized cause some are not sweet at all and are better fried with onions or chunked up in stew than they are baked as a sweet potato in our local traditional way. Don't give up on good sized roots cause of rabbit attack, it's weird but even if severely cropped back they often make good roots anyway. Also, short season maturity is a major part of the limited selection I'v done so far. I just now culled some plants for lack of vigor and poor blooming and found eatable and storable sized roots on all of them. Apparently what looks like a puny worthless plant can still make good roots. I don't regret culling them though cause of the poor blooming and I need to thin them all out some to make it easier to find the seeds. |
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Post by walt on Aug 11, 2018 13:35:21 GMT -5
Years ago I read a paper on sweet potato breeding that said that some traditional sweet potato varieties had good yield due to having good tops, others had good yield due to having efficient storage of the good stuff made by the leaves.
So grafts were made to determine which varieties had good tops, which had good roots. Some graft combinations produced more than either variety. Some combinations produced much less than either variety.
Then crosses were made between those with good tops, between those with good roots, between those with good tops and those with good roots, and those with poor poor tops and those with poor roots.
Best results in the F1 were those from crosses between those with good tops and those with good roots.
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Post by farmermike on Aug 11, 2018 17:31:32 GMT -5
I collected my first ripe seeds yesterday! Also, while I was doing some hand pollinating earlier in the season, I noticed that there was variation between plants in the length of the stamens. Some have both long and short stamens; some have only short. I wonder if this has anything to do with whether or not they are self-compatible.   |
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Post by imgrimmer on Aug 12, 2018 3:17:37 GMT -5
I found still no flowers. But sweetpotatoes are getting bigger and are climbing together with passiflora now like other winding Ipomoeas. Interesting. These are 3 seedlings from last year.
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Post by reed on Aug 12, 2018 4:16:38 GMT -5
I collected my first ripe seeds yesterday! Also, while I was doing some hand pollinating earlier in the season, I noticed that there was variation between plants in the length of the stamens. Some have both long and short stamens; some have only short. I wonder if this has anything to do with whether or not they are self-compatible. I haven't been doing much hand pollination this year, need to go out and check for that. I strongly suspect the short stamens is at least partly the reason for self incompatibility. Do you have variation in the number of flowers per cluster? I'm starting to kinda favor those that have less, they make fewer seeds overall but nearly every flower makes a full set of four nice seeds. On the other hand those with more tend to be more compact and bushy, which I like. There is lots of other variations too. Some have fat stems and stand up tall on their own, some have thin stems and send out long vines. Other than the bushy/seedy combo, and that isn't cut in stone, there doesn't appear to be any strong correlation between the various traits that I can seen. Also most things seem to be more of a blend, rather than a one or the other situation. I guess maybe that is responsible for new phenotypes popping up from the same ancestors. Or maybe it's cause some of these plants are in the F3 generation. I still don't have flowers on the new cloned varieties. One of them , I think, is the same as the one I had a few seasons ago that bloomed massively growing in water but didn't make seed. Yesterday when I was culling I took cuttings from them and a couple different heavy bloomers and put them in the stream part of the garden pond.O' one that I culled had a new color combination to the root, red / purple skin with orange inside. Sure hope that shows up in some of the seedy ones. |
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