Welcome and Introduce Yourself!

[Gilbert Fritz]

Hello,

I go by Gilbert Fritz on Permies and Home Grown Goodness. I live in a suburb of Denver, Colorado, high plains desert with very erratic weather.

It is probably overly pretentious to call myself a plant breeder right now. I’ve been the happy recipients of seed from breeding projects that Andrew Barney and Joseph Lofthouse started, and I’ve grown them out and swapped the seeds back and forth.

Most of my own projects have gotten stalled so far. I am very ambitious, and every year I start far more projects than I can finish, from 500 tomato plants to rocket stove hot frames to a backyard blacksmith forge. As a consequence, things get lost or neglected. But I hope to be a successful plant breeder some day.

My interest lies in developing a truly sustainable agriculture for the Front Range; something that can feed our large urban population without fossil fuels in an area that has limited water, erratic weather, and terrible soils.

Along these lines, my breeding plans for the future are:

continued collaboration with Andrew and Joseph on watermelons, melons, tomatoes and squash, particularly moschatas and interspecies hybrids;

working on a perennial dryland squash by crossing with buffalo gourd;

experimenting with native Ipomoea species in the hopes of developing a sweet potato type crop;

Selecting dahlias that overwinter reliably here, with the eventual goal of developing them as a tuber crop;

experimenting with various other tuber crops;

experimenting with, and breeding landraces for, “pasture cropping” in which annual grain crops are sown into dormant perennial pastures, either cool weather grains into warm weather grasses, or warm weather grains into cool season grasses;

selecting peas for overwintering for dry pea production;

crossing as many Juglans species as I can get to select for a walnut that produces well here and is resistant to Thousand Cankers (black walnuts did well here until the Thousand Cankers came; most other Juglans are not rugged enough for this climate);

Planting out seeds from improved honey locusts to select for adaptability here;

and, as a long shot, growing olives in a greenhouse in hopes that crossing the most hardy types would produce a variety that could grow outdoors here.

[jocelyn]

I'm Jocelyn, and I live on PEI, on the east coast of Canada.  I dabble with whatever interests me at the time, but with a long term interest in chestnuts, elms, and potatoes.  I'm starting to get hardier chestnuts, slow going, due to generation time, and the nut size is coming up too.  Blight resistance is a work in progress.
Elms, well, white elms mostly, and some progress on dutch elm disease resistance.

Potaoes, any that taste good and don't take the late blight.

Tomatoes, just dabbling, but looking for flavour, short time to maturity and no blight.

Hubby likes tomatoes, so looking to grow more for us.

I like the nuts, and use them in breads ( have old nut grinder, pre 1900)

Soil is about 5 feet to bedrock, sandy loam, can be dry in summer, rich.

[Doro]

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

[rowan]

Wow, it's nice to finally see the actual names to go with the profiles that I see in other forums and on FB.

[Oxbow Farm]

Hi there, I'm Dorothy and on the few platforms I frequent (Instagram mostly) I go by 'torp tomaten',

Torp-Dorothy I'm so excited that you are here! 

[Doro]

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