Messages

1

Plant Breeding / Re: Capsaicin

« on: Yesterday at 10:27:31 PM »

I did an experimental cross with sweet pepper x hot pepper.
The F1 was slightly lower in heat, intermediate between the parents in size of the peppers.
The F2 (8 plants) had: 1 plant with no heat, 1 plant with almost no heat (I did not notice heat, but a fried who does not eat spicy food at all said 'it's hot!'), the other plants were noticeably hot in various levels but none reached the hot pepper parent plant. Size of the peppers was small to intermediate, none reached the size of the sweet pepper parent and two were almost as small as the hot pepper parent. Usually high numbers of seedlings are needed to find big ones. Getting size back is always most difficult and often requires back crossing at some point, especially when the parent varieties have a big size difference.
The F3 - F5 derived from the plant with no heat had only offspring that was not hot.

I didn't continue with it further, the flavour was just no good. Bad flavour is really hard to get rid of. I should have picked a better tasting hot pepper variety, just used that particular one for the cross because of its hardiness and low light requirements. It was worth a try.

2

OSSI pledged varieties / Re: Lofthouse-Oliverson Landrace Muskmelon

« on: Yesterday at 09:47:13 PM »

What a great breeding project! It's a joy to see that you succeeded with hardier melons. Mountain weather can be so evil.
I tried melons for so many years, but eventually gave up. It's just not meant to be here. They survive, but don't even make female flowers in my weather. Sigh. But then I can't even grow ordinary cucumbers out of a greenhouse lol why should melons be different.

3

Plant Breeding / Re: Recessive traits in outbreeding landraces.

« on: Yesterday at 07:53:02 AM »

To keep recessives at an acceptabel level in a population is possible by removing the plants that are expressing it right away. But year after year some will still pop up again, since it's often hard/impossible to tell which plants carry the gene and should be excluded in seed saving. And you never know what the pollinators or the wind brougt. With truly unwanted recessives this ends up being more work in the long run than sending it through a bottleneck for two three years.
I got this issue with a purple prodded pea. Despite always saving seed from the darkest podded plants, there will pop up some green ones year after year after year. My pollinators seem to like that landrace variety (dunno what's up with that), which adds to the problem in this case. I'm not too bothered by the occasional green pod plants, but some year I plan to send it through a bottleneck. Building a largeish screen cage is on my to-do list since some years now... maybe next year.

4

Plant Breeding / Re: Hybrid Beans

« on: 2018-11-13, 02:54:53 AM »

I had no idea that there are two types of P. vulgaris. Food crop history is such a complicated and interesting thing. So much to learn!
I am thinking that our beans here are from the larger seeded type from the Andes. Small seeded beans with almost round seeds are a rare find in the dry bean food isle and always imported from quite far.
I have read about crosses of P. vulgaris x P. coccineus in other garden forums, they seem to happen on very rare occasions here. And I have grown the UK variety Moonlight, which is such a cross. It's a commercially available runner bean with some common bean traits. It was ok, but I liked my old runners better in terms of hardiness and taste. I'm more interested in a cross the other way around, a common bush bean with runner traits. I think I'll really try that next summer.

Coat? I never thought of that, ha. Thank you Raymondo!
I'll see if I can code my beans with the list of genes now and do some guestimations of what might happen when I cross them.

5

Plant Breeding / Re: Hybrid Beans

« on: 2018-11-12, 04:41:01 AM »

They look wonderful!
I have no bean breeding project yet, but am thinking about giving it a try next summer. The flower shape scares me though lol so fiddly!
I'm not very lucky with common bean growing. Soil temperature stays too low here for most varieties and the long photoperiod is making things even more difficult. Most varieties flower too late and don't make ripe seed. I found one bush variety (searching since 10 years lol) which gives a decent harvest. I tried adapting it to my conditions by selection, but hit a wall. Very uniform plants, must be fairly inbred already.
My old family runner bean, has adapted fine to its 'new' garden the past 12 years. Stabilizing the different colour lines is progressing nicely too. But most important, it does not mind cold feet or long days. Being a runner it grows huge though, not a field plant and trellis space is limited. Pollination has been an issue lately too.
An interspecific hybrid of both could be interesting. Having a bush bean with the hardiness of my runners would be a dream.

I'd like to learn some more about colour genetics in the dried beans, to make a better decision on which line of my runners to cross with the one common bean variety I can grow. But I could not find much online... probably I'm not using the right key words when searching. Could you help me with a link or the proper English search terms please?

Adding a picture of grandmas runners and the only common beans that grow for me.

6

Plant Breeding / Re: overwintering pea breeding

« on: 2018-11-08, 03:29:10 AM »

That's an interesting project.
I'm selecting for cold hardy plants as well, but mostly because I get cold snaps in spring and it's awful to loose weeks of growth when having to resow. Long term I'd also like to work on summer plantings that survive into Oktober or even November for some late harvest.

In the Alp region it's been tradition to sow certain peas in autumn to give them a head start in spring and get a crop up to a month earlier than spring sown peas. These are called Winterkefe or Wintererbse depending on the area. These winter peas are mange tout / snow peas or field peas (arvense).
I have grown some of them and a lot of Swedish varieties (gråärt). Young plants will survive -5C bare frost without problems as long as there is no wind. In colder temperatures or windchill they need a snow cover though. If the ground freezes in combination with sunshine, that's fatal, they dry out then.

7

Plant Breeding / Re: Homestead Potato Breeding and Selection

« on: 2018-11-07, 02:41:00 AM »

I'd keep it for a while to breed with it.
Fast cooking and fluffy, it looks like an excellent dumpling potato. No peeling of hot potatoes is great, just scraping out with a spoon makes life easier. You probably know this, mentioning it just in case, but poke a hole in them when steaming, they explode sometimes if you don't. A very messy experience when you are lifting the pot lock just at that time... I got covered in potato mash last week because I forgot.
It does really look like a rock though. It's funny, you got rocks and get rock coloured ones, I got sand and get sand coloured ones. Must be Murphy's potato breeding law.
If you have some sibling tubers of that cross, which meet your criteria in colour and yield and show signs of good starch, I'd try crossing it with them. The genes are in there and good starchy varieties for crossing are hard to find, at least in Europe. Most of them are not the best producers, lousy berry keepers or don't have much pollen. I keep two varieties, Mandel and Mehlige Mühlviertler, because of excellent taste. But other than taste and starch they are not exactly great varieties.

Regarding earliness on tetraploids
I get a good amount of earlies when selfing or crossing mid season varieties. Not a lot, but good enough. It's my lazy way to find bonus earlies from other projects.
Selfed late season plants or crosses between them seem to give late season seedlings most of the time. Maybe one in 10 could pass as mid season, but no earlies so far.
I have not done a late x early cross, but plan to do some next year. Probably things will be all over the place in the offspring, with a tendency towards lateness, but I'll try anyways.
Earlies are a pain to breed with in my experience. Selecting for good berry producers might cull them as a side effect. Some years my earlies don't even bother with flowering at all. But they do flower nicely when they are in the right mood. Cool temperatures are helpful. I got 1 berry this year, had about 30 plants with lots of flowers and plenty of good pollen varieties around them. The single berry wasn't fully developed when the plants finished, it had ~10 seeds of dubious quality. Yay.
The slightly easier way to breed with earlies is to use their pollen (if they have fertile pollen) and to match up flowering time with a mid season variety. This usually gives me more berries, more viable seeds per berry and a good percentage of early seedlings.
From my experience young rootbound TPS seedlings give a lower yield than they could if they had been potted up or transplanted in time. Especially the earlies suffer a lot from that, since they start tuberizing early. I try to avoid rootbound seedlings, but sometimes spring is late and there isn't much to do about it. Those years I typically get something like three biggish tubers from early plants. I give them a second year chance then, if they are keepers in other criteria. Having a high cut off weight for the seedlings would cull those without revealing if they are true low producers or got stopped from being rootbound. I think your cut off weight is good for the late varieties, they usually don't improve weight much in second year for me. But I'd not apply 2 pounds to the earlies, 1 pound on early seedling plants isn't too terrible performance, at least in my growing conditions.

8

Community & Forum Building / Re: Welcome and Introduce Yourself!

« on: 2018-11-06, 03:15:26 AM »

Hi Tim! I'm very excited to be here! Thank you so much for guiding me this way.
A place where people won't get upset when I breed or select traits from heirloom landraces - that's heaven

9

Community & Forum Building / Re: Welcome and Introduce Yourself!

« on: 2018-11-05, 11:26:51 AM »

Hi there, I'm Dorothy and on the few platforms I frequent (Instagram mostly) I go by 'torp tomaten', which translates to 'homestead tomato'.
My garden is located in Värmland, Sweden. A very rural forrest area, just above the 60th latitude and close to the Norwegian border. Growing things in acidic sand soil paired with the typical summer being short and cool, but with long days.
I've been gardening, saving seeds and breeding veg for useful or pretty traits for most of my life. Basically since I started walking and helped my grandpa with the family garden. Since then I'm growing food for family and friends, enjoy the diversity of the things I harvest and try to adapt exotic veg to my lousy northern climate.
Main focus atm is potatoes, but I also have projects with tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, broad beans, runner beans, peas, parsnip, turnip, swedes, tomatillo and probably other things which I forgot for the moment. If a crop will grow for me, I usually end up breeding with it at some point.
I have a full time job not related to plants, which peaks at ~80h/ week while it's busy. So my free time in the garden or online can be kind of limited, but I don't sleep much and there is coffee