Welcome and Introduce Yourself!

[Steph S]

Welcome to the forum, Mike!
Breeding is a crazy amount of fun, I agree.  Well it's obvious you are very committed to it.
And here you are, with all the like minded souls on the internet.
Looking forward to hear about all of your projects. 

[Theron Chelmsford]

Hi everyone.  I've been on this forum before with a different username.  I live in South Dakota and my main breeding project right now is my northern okra landrace.  This year will be my fourth growing it.  I also have grown some of William's tomatoes and plan on growing Mission Mountain Grex this summer.  Other projects are squash, cowpeas, and sorghum   Anyway it's great to be here again and thank you for having me back

[William Schlegel]

Good to have you back.

[Vicki]

Hi all! My name is Vicki, and in terms of gardening I'm primarily a tomato enthusiast. I garden in a 1/3 acre suburban lot in Southern Wisconsin (zone 5a) and in the past at a community garden, although I've given up on that this year to focus on improving the home garden.

Although I am a relatively new gardener, I have found great OP varieties for most of the vegetables I grow, with a few vexing exceptions. These exceptions would be a couple of cherry tomato varieties (Sungold, of course) as well as a Taiwanese-style flat and sweet cabbage.

I've been interested in seed saving from the start of my foray into gardening as I have always been a thrifty sort of person who dislikes the way businesses value profit above all. Investigation into the chokehold Sungold have on so many gardeners and how no one has been able to stabilize or create anything comparable in the OP world in decades was astonishing.

As someone married to someone obsessed with Sungolds (and no other tomato, unfortunately), I'm determined to find or breed something my husband finds equal so I'm not stuck buying seeds for the rest of my life. It doesn't have to be exactly the same. When asked, he said his perfect tomato would be "slightly larger, slightly less sweet, but with a similar fruity intense flavor and enough acid for balance". He has quite a good palate, so I know if he admits to liking a tomato, it will be a big hit in general.

I plan to trial more varieties next year- OP ones with various colors and distinct notes of "fruity" as well as hybrid Sungold types. Eventually I'd like to cross the preferred hybrids with selected OP varieties and have a pool of options to explore.

Besides Sungolds, I am working on stabilizing Chocolate Sprinkles (F5) and hope to work on Juliet eventually.

The cabbage will have to wait until I can figure out how to win the battle against my garden's biggest enemy- cabbage moths...

Anyways, it is nice to meet and chat with others who have similar passions for the future of seeds. I'll definitely appreciate any help and insight from more experienced gardeners and breeders into my project once I get it going!

[whwoz]

Welcome Vicki, you will find help here from a range of viewpoints.  You may also find it useful to check out tomatojunction.com, a board with a tomato heavy bias among its members, several others whom are on here also.

[Cathy A]

Vicki,

Try Dwarf Eagle Smiley. If your husband is okay with yellow instead of orange fruit, I think he will be happy with them.

[Vicki]

Hi! Thanks for the welcome. I'll definitely take a look at Tomato Junction as well. And I don't think the color matters to my husband, so I'll also look into Dwarf Eagle Smiley.

[Hana Yoshida]

Please call me Hana Yoshida, Hana written with 華 and Yoshida with 芳田. I'm many things: a citizen scientist, an algae enthusiast, a reader, a rubbernecker, a person with many names, and a certified oddball by the standards of those who know me to list a few... but I'm not a plant breeder! Like a rootbound indoor tree my future is constrained by sensibility, but I love gardening and yard work enough to want them to take more of my time and effort rather than less. It's fun and therapeutic.

I confess there's an anarchic undercurrent to my being in both the political and colloquial sense, which extends to my daydreams—as disillusioned as I am with my area's cultural ideal of "independence" I like the thought of a <10 acre mostly offgrid PNW property independent of the hellish predominant food system, a place where a few friends and I are free to primp and propagate to our hearts' content. I don't know what feels better: working toward my agriculture goals or sharing the fruits of my labor. Including literal fruits, haha. I won't hinge my happiness on hypotheticals though, I plant where I am.

I'm a hobbyist gardener but a complete plant breeding layperson. I'd rather experiment until I settle like sediment into a niche, but I'd like to try making my own Sagittaria latifolia and Oemleria cerasiformis cultivars—I'm emotionally invested in my cultivar ideas. I'm fascinated by the Taraxacum genus, intrigued by the order Rosales, and utterly obsessed with transforming instances of the Taraxacum holotype Taraxacum officinale. Currently, I'm plying some indoor-kept Taraxacum officinale sprouts with well-lit warmth and consistent water: they'll be my first breeding project. Their flowering can't come soon enough! I don't have a specific goal for them, I just want to see how difficult they'll be. Beyond this motley grouping (and maybe rice or brown lentils or adzuki) I'd rather focus on bioremediation candidates second and plants native or naturalized to my area first. Even after everything that's already happened, a lot of changes are coming. I want to help our struggling biota adapt to the caprice of the growth conditions ahead because if it goes down, so are we. The new paper 'Plant science's next top models' suggests there is lots of untapped potential in the world of model organisms, so I don't think I'm being too ambitious in my selection.

Here are my property's properties: it is a suburban 0.17-ish acre lot located in an arsenic-heavy part of Tacoma, a town in the lush water-rich Western part of the US state of Washington. I'm within walking distance of the coast; maritime winds may complicate outdoor pollination. My zip code is 98407, so Zone 9a seems to be my current USDA plant hardiness zone according to the 2023 USDA map. The lot's elevation is somewhere between sea level and 150 meters. I don't know the water table's level. Excepting a section where spent coffee grounds are regularly dumped, The lot has uniform soil quality without drastically different microbiomes: there's fine-grained loamy sand, fine-grained sand, and areas of gravel made of an unknown grey mineral. All of which drains quicker than a coffee drinker's bladder. Mineral-wise, there's marginal amounts of human-added silica sand. Beyond the first 0.3 meters from the surface, rocks predominate. I know nothing about this soil's mycorrhizal makeup, but the seasonal mushroom residents suggest it's adequate—they're not unwelcome, but they were uninvited nonetheless. My success in salvaging a mold-contaminated lion's mane grow kit by crumbling it and smushing the crumbles into a rotting tree stump earlier this year bolsters this hypothesis. Even without having the sun's path or recurring wind patterns logged in a spreadsheet, the more I study this lot the more microclimates I discover. Here's my pre-2020 meteorological data-informed guess as to what the weather is like: an average of 1233 mm rain yearly, 180 frost-free days yearly, a summer temperature average of 60 degrees Fahrenheit yearly, and a winter average of 30 degrees Fahrenheit yearly. I don't know how to estimate the mean yearly temperature. I made these numbers up, so I'll summarize my area in vaguer but more reliable terms: summers are increasingly hot and rainless, winters are wet and humid. Early to late autumn is fog season. Frost can be common but it seldom snows here and I imagine snow will only become rarer. Freezes aren't common.

I am unsure how the Köppen climate system or the Thornthwaite climate system would classify my property and that's even before considering the EPA's esoteric ecoregion schema, but I hope I eventually figure them out. The easier my circumstances are to parse, the more useful other people will find my posts.

Whether you made it this far, thank you for reading. Advice, especially on writing plant-specific stud books, is welcome.

edit: edited to remove the self-reminder to paste into this forum thread, hah.

[A. Pel]

Please call me Hana Yoshida, Hana written with 華 and Yoshida with 芳田.

Welcome to the forum Hana. Keep us posted on the Taraxacum officinale - a very worthwhile project.

I'm pretty sure that the Soviets did a lot of work domesticating and breeding the dandelion in the 60's and 70's. Not sure what became of the results - probably all lost in the breakup.

[Kai Emerge]

Hello everyone!

Call me Kai Emerge, a self-taught plant enthusiast from France, more precisely from the temperate oceanic zone around Vernosc-lès-Annonay (USDA zone 8b, with a growing season of about 7 months, from April to November). Currently living in an apartment, I'm experimenting indoors with soil/hydroponic setups and simple LEDs, but in 2026, I'll have access to a 60 m² garden: it's time to scale up my experiments.

My passion for plant breeding started a few years ago, during my adolescence while studying for a vocational diploma in electrical engineering (nothing to do with plants – I was more busy wiring circuits than crossing chromosomes!). Then, as an adult, I switched to horticultural production training, and that's when it hit me: the stories of Luther Burbank, the atomic gardens of the 1950s, the fascinating genetic diversity of hemp (and so many other wonders)... It opened my eyes to genetics in all its forms – traditional selection, wild diversity, mutagenesis, and even high-tech tools like Agrobacterium or CRISPR for hacking plants. A beginner in practice but a voracious reader in theory, I'm ready to transform these readings into concrete seedlings.

About 8 years ago, I attempted my first real cross: a mashup of sunflowers ('Sunspot' x 'Lyngs California Greystriped') which gave me about a hundred F1 seeds. I kept them like a treasure (a bad habit of a compulsive collector!), but I haven't been able to sow them until now – hopefully, they're still viable for a full-scale trial next year. In the meantime, in my compact urban garden, I'm crazy about small varieties: micro-dwarf tomatoes are my queens ("Baby" and "Florida Petite" for their productivity on the balcony), closely followed by the "Mutant Candlelight" pepper and Chlorophytum comosum, whose variegated mother plants provide me with some hand-pollinated seeds to try and breed some unusual forms (I've been delving into their genetics recently, and it's a crazy world of hidden variations and heterosis).

In general, when it comes to plants, I have a soft spot for bizarre, even monstrous varieties, those mutants that defy the norms—that's my thing.

For 2026, big plans: ambitious crosses on tomatoes, corn, and peppers to try and realize my ideas, plus safe mutagenic tests (caffeine or UV-C) on amaranth, petunias, bok choy, taraxacum, plantago and tomatoes.
And why open source? Because knowledge in breeding or mutagenesis must be free and accessible to everyone (safely, of course), it's the key to resilient and democratized food systems, without corporate barriers.
Happy to join this community to observe, learn, and share.

Have a great day everyone!

[Steph S]

Welcome Kai, and best of luck on your journey.
I look forward to hearing about your projects!

[Tim DH]

Hi Kai,
    Greetings from Yorkshire. I also have a soft spot for the bizarre. I grew some of these Space Chillis this year. Apparently the varieties have been 'bred' by sending the parents into Space! Not a practical mutation breeding mechanism for the amateur!!

Tim DH

[Kai Emerge]

Hello Tim, oh that's great, which varieties did you grow from the Hangjiao Space Chilli range and what did you think of them?

I received some HJ1 Corona and HJ6 Pulsar seeds a few weeks ago, and I plan to cross them with "Mutant Candlelight" next year.

In theory, we could do space breeding using stratospheric balloons, which would be more accessible to amateurs, although there are also regulatory issues to consider.

[Tim DH]

Hi Kai,
       The ones in the photo are Helix Nebula. I also grew Big Bang, however I didn't notice much difference.

      I liked them, and saved seed, but since I don't isolate, they may not be true.

Tim DH

[Steph S]

Hi to you too, Hana Yoshida, I just saw your post.
I share your love of Rosales, and thought I would mention how well they did as a group here in our dryest summer ever.   I happened to plant a lot of everbearing strawberries this year which did remarkably well in spite of the weather. They do have a big advantage over the wild types here which are single bearing and always at risk of late frosts.  I also have a number of roses, that weathered the heat and drought really well in spite of receiving no supplemental water. 
I did notice that the Beach Rose (rugosa var alba) does not make hips in a dry summer although the plants didn't falter and put out a new bloom or two each time there was a hint of rain.  The Sweet Briar (rubiginosa) made tons of hips, so that would be food in a drought situation.
Apples did surprisingly well in spite of the drought too.