Pukekohe Long Keeper Red

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Feb 26, 2016 14:21:19 GMT -5 TRellis said:

would not intentionally crossing something like the Utah Yellow Spanish onion or even the Utah Yellow Spanish Sweet onion with something like the Pukekohe Long Keeper (PLK) in an effort to create a long storage intermediate-day onion or, even better, a long storage intermediate-day sweet onion, be the essence of landrace?

People are free to use their own definitions of words. In my world view, if there are only two parents to a cross, I generally think of the offspring as a clade: If I were to make a cross like that in my garden, I would call the resulting population by a variety name, but I wouldn't call it a grex or landrace.

If I allowed 5 to 20 or more varieties of onions to cross, I'd call it a grex for the first 2-7 generations. If a variety is not well adapted to my farm, society, and way of doing things, then I am reluctant to call it a landrace. After the population is thoroughly adapted to the farmer's way of doing things, and to the soil, pests, diseases, and climate, only then would I start thinking of it as a landrace. I might call something a proto-landrace if it's been on my farm long enough to not really be a grex, but it's not yet locally adapted enough that I'd call it an adaptivar-landrace.

[ferdzy]

Speaking as someone who crossed Early Yellow Globe with Rossa di Tropea, I can tell you the result was what most people would call an f1 hybrid... extremely consistent (mainly a slight variability in size). I'm aiming for landrace territory as I add more onions every grow-out, but with 2 years between each one it'll be quite a while before I get there.

[trixtrax]

Can't wait to see how this onion performs in western Oregon this year.

Will post pix as they come along.