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Post by alkapuler on Feb 15, 2009 21:46:55 GMT -5
-good to hear of successful crosses with hirsutum -the flowers are beautiful, the foliage and stems fuzzy, and it lived unattended for 5 years growing up from the floor of our greenhouse -agree that genetics takes perseverance and many good ideas get us to the door -online is info that somatic cell fusion in solanums can be used to overcome barriers to interspecies crosses
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 15, 2009 21:35:58 GMT -5
-became interested in wapato last year, i purchased fifty tubers each of S. latifolia and S. rigida from Wildlife Nurseries Inc, Oshkosh WI, planted in tubs either in pots or directly in the 20-40 gallon tubs, using sand and pea gravel with some humusy compost in different pots; results were uniformly poor, most latifolias died, some from the Wisconsin company were fist sized, very nice -the we went on a road trip and collected two plants, one from southern Washington, the other from northern Oregon, one with red stems, one with green -i will check out the thread about Chinese Arrowhead -developing a breeding system is of interest for its great potential -in solanums, there has been work using cell fusion to overcome breeding problems, and the Sagittarias all have 20 chromosomes if i remember correctly, where saline tolerance, alkali tolerance, extreme heat tolerance can be conveyed to productive foodplant cultivars -thanks for communicating your interesting and valuable work
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 14, 2009 13:27:14 GMT -5
-looking for Hablitzia in Mabberley's The Plant Book, finds it a genus in the Chenopodiaceae, a relative of spinach, beets and chard; might want to check out how much oxalates are in the leaves -and Hostas are in the Agavaceae and related to Camassia as well, other members of the Agave family have inulins in their leaves, ie polyfructoses like in yacon tubers -tequila made from Agaves is inulins in the leaves and cabezas fermented into ethyl alcohol
-when more seed of Hablitzia is available, we would like to grow it here in the PNW where cool loving crops overwinter well
-thanks for the great insights towards broadening our available food plants
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 14, 2009 0:42:08 GMT -5
-most of us grew up with the notion that bacteria were germs and that they all belonged together -then Carl Woese looked at the RNA sequences of ribosomal genes for many kinds of organisms, mostly microbes -and to his surprise, delight and ensuing struggle found that bacterial sized microbes were actually two major groups, the archaea or 'the old ones' and the eubacteria familiar to us as bacteria -the third major group of living organisms on earth are eukaryotes to which the fungi, plants and animals belong -the forth major group is viruses -so when folks looked for nitrate producing microbes in the soil, they looked at bacteria who like rhizobia can fix atmospheric nitrogen and turn it into reduced nitrogen compounds like ammonia, amino sugars, amino acids, nucleosides and they did not have the ability to convert these internal reduced nitrogen compounds to nitrate which is what the plant takes up and stores in the leaf vacuoles or to convert fertilizers like ammonium sulphate or ammonium phosphate into oxidized nitrogen storage compounds -so how do the synthetic nitrogen compounds get to be oxidized in soil? -a few years ago it was discovered that a group of archaea, not bacteria, convert reduced ammonia compounds into oxidized ones in the soil -we did not know they existed and could not grow them in the lab -they are called 'crens', short from crenarchaeota -the continuing new discoveries about life are overturning many rigid, incorrect views about life itself
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 13, 2009 20:01:56 GMT -5
Compost as an Eco-organism or Feeding the CEO
Al and Lin Kapuler
The cool moist spring has become summers melting heat. Many plants have made their way from overwintering and springtime beds to the compost pile. Lettuces have begun to flower. Mustards, cabbages, broccoli, turnips, arugula and their other brassicaceous relatives have flowered and many have matured seeds. Weedy grasses and daisies have shed their pollen, made seeds and spread them widely in the wind, in the soil and in the intestines of many creatures. So when the lettuces have yellow flowers and they mature into puffs of fluff that catch the wind and the seeds begin to fly off into new locales, put the maturing plants in the compost pile. When the Red Russian Kale matures its golden yellow flowers into 2” long cylindrical seed pods (technically called siliques) filled with a dozen seeds, pull the plants and put them in the compost pile. The idea is to allow the plants we grow for food to complete their cycles both in the garden and in the compost. Rather than collecting and saving the seeds, an alternative is to plant them en masse by putting the maturing plants in the compost. A month or two later, with a simple turn of the plants, stalks, leaves, stems, flowertops, seedtops and weeds, the piles turn into densely planted beds of salad plants with some unwanted weeds. The weeds are easily pulled as part of the next compost pile and what remains are fully planted food beds, done without buying any packets of seeds, sidestepping seed collection, drying, preservation and storage. Composting to make compost is a sidestep also. Composting is to make soil. Compost soil made from foodplants making mature seeds makes fertile, amendment free, food plant replete, garden beds. As a general process, we mix about half green and half dried material to the compost. This includes grass clippings, prunings from trees and shrubs, returns from previous compost piles and seaweeds from the local coastal shores. We consider the compost pile a compost organism. In the field, raw materials of all sorts coming from the garden are the contributors. In the home kitchen garden, scraps from meal preparation combined with weeds are mixed and fed to the head of the organism. The tail of the compost organism is fertile soil. Our composting organisms are not particularly hot, though sometimes the mix of fresh green with old dried brown heats up to pasturization temperature. The piles are aerated with bigger materials and their height is rarely over 3’ If we include maturing food plants with their seeds, then high temperatures will kill the seeds. So high temperature leading to sterilization are not particularly useful if the proportion of food plants seeds to unpalatable weed seeds is high and hence the soil coming from the compost is rich in foodplants. Nor are our compost organisms particularly abundant in earthworms, though there are some and sometimes many. Big stalks and woody stems go through several cycles of compost organisms to become microscopic particles useful as food and environments for bacteria, archaea and fungi. Nor is it necessary to find and provide additional amendments to the compost. The old plants carry the inoculants for transforming the plants into compost. Add water and mix. Without enough water none of this will work. Occasional thorough watering will give great compost soil, the rate depending on the temperature, the number of times one turns the piles, rainfall and new food for the Composting Ecological Organism (CEO). The CEO is our gardening ally. By feeding the CEO we encourage recycling, promote fertility and make gardening more fun. And this is one example in which the CEO is fed old plants, fresh green leaves; no $$$ and no manure. Micro-organism diversity is promoted by composting yet we are just beginning to figure out how it works. Most microbes, bacteria, archaea and fungi like to grow together. The conversion of ammonia to nitrate is done in soil and compost by ‘crens’, hithertofore unknown, overlooked and widespread archaea. The cooperation of nitrogen fixing bacteria with crens and with bacilli that release phosphate are parts of the biosome of organisms that promotes fertility, vigor and productive plant growth. Then there are the viruses that enhance genetic recombination promoting microbial adaptation to new inputs such as vegetables, fruits, leaves and stems coming from the diversity of gardening possibilities. Economic consumerism has obscured some of the essentials of organic gardening and farming. We tend to purchase solutions to our problems rather than figure out ways to use abundant local resources. In touch with the cycles of seed to plant to seed, the composting process, feeding the compost organisms, gives us fertile, foodplanted soil, satisfaction of using what is easily available and right around us, and a way to promote gardening with less expense and more food production. The key is to allow our favorite foodplants to complete their cycles, make seeds, and then sprout them up in the compost. In an increasingly more interesting process, composting allows us to deal with difficult weeds and to develop areas where the rhizomatous weeds have taken over. We pile “bad weeds” on top of “bad weeds” making difficult gardening locales amenable to fertility enhancement thru compost location and development. By attending the composting process, rolling or moving the pile, feeding the head and weeding the body and the tail, the CEO becomes an integral part of organic gardening.
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 13, 2009 17:29:15 GMT -5
-wonderful, its time to take back the SSE Grower's Network by putting it on the web -choosing to print out the huge book, or paying for someone to do it is up to each one of us, while looking at it online, editing our listings as they happen, changes the process from a static, once a year, to a dynamic, any and all times, phenomenon -and it doesn't need to have fees or dues -this year, there are 200 pages (ca 6000) of tomatoes -few folks provide seeds for umbels, brassicas, other biennials -local native food plants are ignored, undeveloped -folks who get seeds from the network rarely reoffer them -the taxonomic ordering of the listings is alphabetical, superficial and silly -there is a world flora and a well organized view of all the plants called APGII -by seeing the individuals in the whole, we see patterns of manifestation, and the places where we need to broaden our collections, develop deeper resolve to interact organism with ecosystem, garden with the biosphere
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 13, 2009 17:01:47 GMT -5
-googling your question gave info that many of the Lycopersicon species interbreed, at least pimpinellifolium (currant tomato), neorickii, chmielewskii, habrochaites and pennellii do cross with esculentum -i tried crosses using hirsutum in crosses with esculentum with no success -in classic biology, species are defined by their ability to interbreed ie crosses between members of different species are sterile or poorly fertile -interspecies crosses in plants are somewhat common, and in some groups of plants like orchids there are complicated crosses involving 5 or more genera -there is a related issue of those plants that have male and female plants rather than male and female flowers on the same plants or in the same flower
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 13, 2009 1:14:05 GMT -5
-the SSE Grower's Network has become the orphan child of the organization it founded -having been established to promote a decentralized conservation of heirloom flowers, food plants, medicinals and herbs, it has become the custodian of a huge seed collection, and become engaged in the sale of seeds as a major activity -extending and developing the vision and direction of the grower's network, the core of the SSE, is up to members, contributors and basically those interested in extending the range of interests from predominantly anglo-european based food plants to the undeveloped foodplants local to our northamerican ecosystems that were used by the native amerindians before the immigrants arrived -from sea to shining sea, from ecosystem to ecosystem, from valleys to the mountains, from deserts to the rainforests, there are species worthy of development, worthy of inclusion in the SSE, and worthy of engagement by talented, curious, active gardeners who are interested in more than the repetitive offerings of tomatoes, curcurbits and solanums
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 12, 2009 22:03:47 GMT -5
-the preps of Sonic Bloom that Dan Carlson provided me were made without soap since it contradicted the general organic sentiment and i used them for the germinations but avoided using Sonic Bloom in the field, also, like you and Dominique, to avoid conflicts with the emerging organic movement
-taste is a difficult discriminator; we still don't recognize umami which is the flavor of mixed free amino acids like in miso or good tomato juice
-to look at the free amino acids, Dr. S. Gurusiddiah, head of the analytical lab of Washington State U. at Pullman and i did hundreds of HPLC analyses of organically grown veggie, fruit and flower juices
-results were interesting for all crops; tomatoes with low and high levels of the neurotransmitter GABA (gamma amino butyric acid), as well as glutamine and different amounts of 15 other free aminos was particularly informative in terms of nutritional selection characteristics
-we, too, use seaweed in our amendments, when we use amendments...
-in the field, i used Sonic Bloom sound system when foliar feeding
-i was much more impressed by the effects on germination, particularly by GA-3
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 12, 2009 21:04:48 GMT -5
-maybe a decade or two ago, we got some Walking Stick Giant Kale seeds from England and it has since reseeded itself every year in our backyard garden -every once in a while a plant will live through 2 winters -9 Star Perennial Broccoli also survives 2 and sometimes three winters especially if one eats the fall flower spikes; many plants are more susceptible to cold after flowering -so does Sea Kale, Crambe maritima, which lasts for several winters and reestablishes itself with underground rhizomes, if the rodents don't eat the crowns -and from cultivars like Snow's Cauliflower, Eco Brussel Sprouts, Romanesco Broccoli with thick, hefty and stout stalks, plants close to or still heirlooms, it seems that the strong and somewhat woody stems allows longer term survival -so we crossed Eco Brussel Sprouts with Romanesco Broccoli -the F4 generation had some plants that were like shrubby trees -in the same field, a little later, a Holland Late Winter Cabbage seed crop flowered, we harvested and planted about 60-80 plants from the seed; there were several crosses to kale, a host of nice cabbages and 4 plants with five to nine 1-2' long arms having cabbages on each arm-a little cabbage tree with a vegetable on each arm
-these observations and developments all have to do with developing perennial brassicas
PS we have been supplying Nichols Garden Seeds with Walking Stick Giant Kale for the recent several years
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 12, 2009 20:46:50 GMT -5
nice to hear about Sonic Bloom -20 years ago Dan Carlson paid me $1600 (which allowed me to build a seedroom inside an old shed) to do a set of germination experiments with a variety of seeds testing out his GA-3 foliar feeding spray in conjunction with the sounds of birds and crickets going on at the same time as the seeds germinated - i was astonished how strongly the GA-3 influenced certain kinds of seeds, particularly how it stimulated the germination of old cucurbit seeds, especially squash (4 common species), watermelon, cantalope and lagenaria (white flowered gourds), and how it enhanced the early growth of lettuce seedlings but not their germination, and how well solanum seed (tomato, eggplant, capsicum pepper) responded by germinating, quickly and well -JL Hudson, World Seed Service suggests using 1 part GA-3/1000 parts water; my sense is that this is more than necessary; i've just ordered some to find out
-the red (RCF) and yellow centiflor (YCF) tomatoes, centiflor meaning 100 flowers, are semi-determinate in that new inflorescences arise throughout and late into the season but the plants remain somewhat compact and can be 3-4' tall if supported -this year we will try hanging baskets
-since the expression of the hypertress character is variable, some plants have 50-75 flowers on a tress, other have 100-150, there is room for continued selection and suggests that the trait is not dominant and that heterozygotes from humboldtii flower expression (30/inflorescence) and somehow one of the other parents led to a 3-5 fold amplification of number of flowers on an inflorescence, but along with this there are some other traits like the reach of the flowers beyond the leaves so that across the field one can easily distinguish the centiflor cultivars, how the new flower buds look like insects, and how the tresses branch in novel ways, these are all emergent characteristics -sometimes there are 3-5 tresses, othertimes 8-10 -in summary, only by using these hypertress tomatoes as parents will we know more of how the HT gene is expressed, co-expressed or dominant -at the end of last season i crossed a purple tomato with RCF and have three fruits on my desk...
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 12, 2009 0:49:29 GMT -5
-after you taste hundreds of tomatoes, separate them into useness categories, look at myriad colors and patterns, figure out the most vigorous and productive, then you may become interested in other levels of nutrition that affect all of the cells in our bodies, that have a broad, wide and underlying significance for our health, that promote protein synthesis and find free amino acids in the juices of common fruits, vegetables, herbs, flowers and seeds, mostly precursors to proteins as a way to look for improvements in nutrition
-the use of genetic discoveries to make disease or herbicide resistance in food plant cultivars casts a large but not insurmountable shadow on potentialities that are important to all of us -it begins with aging, genetic propensities to diseases, consequences of longterm wear on our cells, organs, tissues and the repair systems for all of these interconnected parts of our bodies and lives under the duress of stress and pollution -and has to do with human population, the ecosystems that support us, the lack of food productivity in the many marginal, cold, frozen, polluted ecosystems that are part of earth and part of us -as well as ecosystems like the oceans and the air which are as yet unadapted to many kinds of living creatures -so one has to consider growing vegetables in the oceans, having ripe fruits and roots float to the surface when ripe as well as plants in the sky carried aloft by microbes that make hydrogen filled living balloons when the sun shines... -meaning that new combinations of complex genetic systems, combining traits, characteristics held differently by the major groups of living creatures; viruses, archaea, bacteria and eukarya (the animals, plants, fungi familiar to us) expands widely our abilities to inhabit the earth, to adapt to climate and social changes and to have greater respect and admiration for the biosphere we live in -and then we get to inhabitation of the solar system
-Dylana Kapuler and Mario DiBenedetto have founded Peace Seedlings and sent out their first list this year, 2009. They have been growing seeds organically for several years. -Peace Seeds retired from seed lists in 2007 -Bi Jihuan, an eminent Chinese agronomist who has been collaborating with Alan M. Kapuler Ph.D. (aka mushroom) since 1993 developed a website for PeaceSeeds.com, a domain graciously held for us by James Lawson, which is ps02.cn -so Peace Seeds and Peace Seedlings are generationally and somewhat functionally distinct as the transfer takes years and seasons
-the Kinship Maps, as Dylan sez...using ideas for our maps...have been likened by some to fractals -i see them as bed diagrams, as potentiality for adaptation to the changing eco-conditions, as a way to see the world flora as a whole, as a way of learning more about diversity, about plants that are reps for the major groups for the APGII system which beginning with Amborella has major branches in the Magnoliids or old trees, the Monocots, the core eudicots, the Rosids (1 and 2) and the Asterids (1 and 2) -not too complicated for 250,000 species -and entropy decreases under conditions of input of energy -so organization and integration are a way of storing energy -which in this case is the biodiversity of life in a garden providing kinship in display, growth and development, specializing in taxa, optimizing the manyness of kinds
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 12, 2009 0:10:06 GMT -5
over decades we have grown hundreds of Lycopersicon cultivars mostly esculentums, some pimpinellifoliums as well as several other species
then one day in the SSE Lycopersicon humboldtii was offered and since a new, to us, species in a common taxon is always interesting we requested and received some seed, from Rosemarie LaCherez, and grew up some plants with yellow-orange cherry sized fruits in clusters like grapes. Some clusters had 30 fruits.
my daughter Kusra who had learned to hand pollinate peas was interested in doing some crosses in tomatoes and picked out the Grape Tress Tomato as a pollen parent
she crossed it with several different cultivars: Stakeless, Skorospelka, Willamette
then one day we were sitting in the greenhouse where an 8' tall vine of Lycopersicon hirsutum had been living=surviving for several years and with its bright yellow flowers held in umbel-like clusters, we considered crossing it with L. humboldtii but since hirsutum had never given us fertile fruits, we used it as a pollen parent onto the Grape Tress Tomato... and now several years later we have hypertress lines;Red Centiflor and Yellow Centiflor Tomatoes, both cherry tomatoes
both make tresses of flowers that extend on top of the foliage, have soft, long velvety hairs on the flower buds and have so far up to 150 flowers on an inflorescence
the most fruits on a tress is 89
i'm considering spraying some with GA-3 to reach more fruitful tresses
and in further consideration of the hypertress trait, which also appear in the hypertresses of pea tendrils, in the multiplication of the rows in corn cobs, the polypetalous trait in flowers, linking it to branching patterns, number of flowers per node, and maybe the hox genes in animals with the multiplication of ribs and for all of us the multiplication of certain DNA/RNA sequences, duplications and then sometimes reduplications, as has happened with the genetic material of fungi and other eukaryotes.
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 11, 2009 23:52:52 GMT -5
last year Dylana and Mario grew alot of different Capsicums and a few weeks ago told me that the Criolla Sella, a C. baccatum was noticeably cold hardier than the annuums, chinense and fructescens that we grow
and a few days ago in Richo Cech's catalog he says the same thing about baccatums
i don't know if baccatums will cross with annuums but both have 24 chromosomes and it seems worthwhile to try developing some bell, paprika and grossum (large, elongate, stuffing) annuums with better tolerance and success in cool soils, wet conditions, chilly summer nights
the same thing is relevant to eggplants which need more cold hardiness selection
and yes Alan that is the website for the Wild Capsicums
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Post by alkapuler on Feb 11, 2009 14:44:31 GMT -5
the peppers with 24 chromosomes, 12 pairs, are the Annuum group which includes chinense, frutescens, chacoense and galapagoense, the Baccatum group which includes pendulum, baccatum, praetermissum and umbilicatum and a third group which includes pubescens, the rocoto, eximium, tomentosum and cardenasii.
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