Welcome and Introduce Yourself!

[Nicolas]

Hi everyone, I'm Luca and I write from Ferrara, Italy. I'm a plywright and a teacher, but in my free time I take care of a small vineyard. I try to breed the varieties I have since 2013. Last summer I also started reading about tomato and goji breedind and I would like to learn more about it. I would like to find some vitis acerifolia and cinerea cuttings but in Europe they're not so easy to find, obvously if someone would have them, I could send some of my cuttings... Thanks for attention, Luca.

Welcome from France Luca !

I'm also interested by tomato and goji breeding. For now i'm waiting for my sweet cultivars of goji to fruit so i can cross pollinate and select from there. There are nurseries in Italy that seels NQ7 which is said to have good eatin qualities.

[Kevin Collignon]

I didn't see this thread when I first got on here so I guess I'll introduce myself now.

Hello everyone, My name is Kevin I am 28 years old and recently "retired" from a almost 10 years in law enforcement with the last 5 years being a Sheriff's Deputy to pursue a simple life for me and my family. I have been married for 8 years and have two daughters ages 5 and 2 with a son to be born any day now. We live in a self built off-grid tiny house we get all of our house and garden water from rain water collection on a small section of a larger family property with about 2 acres that are mostly wooded with about 1/2 acre of cleared are that I am developing for annual gardens.

I live in Dobbin, Texas which is the south east portion of the state we stand at a whopping whole 260 ft in elevation. My USDA growing zone is technically 8B but most years we end up more in the 9A-9B we have 250-300 frost free days a year with about 55 inches of rainfall a year.

Our winters and early spring are typically wet and cloudy with high humidity  between 80-100% and high heat setting in by early April and lasts until the end of September with most mid summer days being 100+ degrees.

I have been gardening poorly at all of of my previous homes for the past 3ish years. Since moving to this new property I have been doing large amounts of research into gardening methods and plant breeding and was inspired by Joseph Losthouse's work to attempt to "landrace everything"

I am very excited to have found a community that supports these methods. Like I said this is all new to me so I will be doing a lot more asking questions than answering questions or giving advise.

Thank you everyone for the information and support they have already given me.

[Steph S]

Welcome Kevin, and best of luck with your garden this year and your new son. 

[AndrewB]

Welcome Kevin and Bill and others!

Please jump right in to old threads or even better start your own threads on any topic of gardening & plant breeding of your favorite crops!

Bill i would love to hear about your gooseberries and whether you grow currants?!

[clweeks]

Hi, I'm Chris. You probably don't know me from anywhere else. I'm an amateur, but reading a lot to catch up. I've been growing almost nothing but peppers for six(ish) years in our town-lot with only a tiny patch of sunny space, but moved to land eight months ago and am taking on gardening much more seriously. I'm on twenty acres of wooded sandy loam in northern Minnesota, zone 3b.

I'm 51, my kids are 26 and 19 and I've been married for 24 years. I've been writing software for 20 years which seemed like a great job since I was a hobby programmer before that, but now I hate it and feel trapped by my 'golden handcuffs' #firstWorldProblems, right? On the plus side, such a career funds hobbies nicely and I can afford to jump right into growing plants and suffer even pretty expensive losses (which I have -- all my true garlic seed is dead).

I'm growing: field corn, peppers, tomatoes, lettuce, garlic, melons, squash, pickling cukes, potato onions, potatoes from tuber and TPS, galangal, sea kale, horseradish, daikon, basil, arugula, leeks, other onions, garbanzos, common beans (bush and pole), chickpeas, wheat, apples - grafted cultivar and wild seeds, seaberry, blackberries, raspberries, sunroots, cilantro, pawpaw, walnut, strawberries, other berries, other herbs, tomatillo, lilac, daffodil, etc. I'm attracted to the writing and philosophy of Joseph Lofthouse. The two best books I've read this year are Carol Deppe's Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties and Will Bonsall's Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening. I don't know how long it will take to gain this level of proficiency, but I'd like to grow all the food we eat for a year aside from occasional travel. (Long term, we're not going to give up oranges and bananas, but we could do it for a year.)

I think that's a pretty thorough intro. I'll probably be reading mostly -- I'm here to learn and figure it'll be a while before I have much to contribute.

(ETA: Why am I required to affirm that an elephant is smaller than a mouse in order to post?)

[AndrewB]

(Long term, we're not going to give up oranges and bananas, but we could do it for a year.)

I think that's a pretty thorough intro. I'll probably be reading mostly -- I'm here to learn and figure it'll be a while before I have much to contribute.

(ETA: Why am I required to affirm that an elephant is smaller than a mouse in order to post?)

Welcome! Sounds like you'll fit right in. I think you might have more to contribute than you think. I would love to hear more about your peppers. Im not sure how many dedicated pepper threads are here already.

I would assume the elephant question is to filter out spam on your first post.

Are you planning a greenhouse for bananas and oranges,?

I would love to do the same someday. Right now im growing an "Apple Banana" indoors. When we took our trip to Hawaii they tasted so good. I never want to eat common store bananas ever again.

https://youtu.be/9evVLC0lnsA

[clweeks]

Thanks for the welcome!

I would assume the elephant question is to filter out spam on your first post.

It had the answer backwards. I had to say an elephant is *smaller* than a mouse to post. It took me several tries before I figured out what I had to do.

Are you planning a greenhouse for bananas and oranges,?

I was maybe unclear. I meant that those are examples of things we'll never grow and don't want to give up, but we could do so for a year in order to make the all home-grown challenge work.

I had a 6x6 Palram greenhouse but the wind grabbed it and scattered it all over our yard. I've salvaged what I could and plan to rebuild a bigger one from the scrap and extra hardware, panels, etc. But it's just season-extension, not for keeping citrus through the cold, cold winters. Maybe kale!

[Steph S]

Welcome Chris.     I love your ambitious growing plans.  Let us know how your first season there pans out.
I know people in Alberta who grow things in 'zone 3' that we can't manage here in zone 4 or 5.   So no doubt you'll have survivors to push the envelope as that is what the breeding is all about (and Joseph the master of that technique!).

Have a look at the thread(s) about Koppen zones.  That seems to tell more about the growing season in different places, instead of the old zone systems which reflect how cold your winters are and how long your summers are but none of the other details that matter so much.

[clweeks]

I love your ambitious growing plans...Have a look at the thread(s) about Koppen zones

Yeah, the ambition has been kind of grueling. and certainly bit off more than I can chew. I've given up on getting a patch of sweet corn planted this year, for instance. And I was supposed to have a hen-house built, but it's just a foundation so far.

I read up a little on Koppen zones yesterday, actually I'm in Dfb. The USDA zones do capture useful info that Koppen doesn't (like our low temp this past winter was -36F and there are other places in Dfb that are much warmer and the plants that will overwinter are different), so maybe using them together is the way to go. And for all I know there are a bunch of other scales that are meaningful...neither of these two capture how much snow-cover we have insulating the ground, e.g.

[Steph S]

Oh my the prairie cold!     I agree, you have to combine more than one system to get even the vaguest idea what you can grow and especially overwinter.
We rarely go below -12C here and that for a few days, record low is -23.8C / only around -11 F.  Freeze and thaw all winter long, and the usual "cold day" is only around -6 C that is in the +20 F range.
OTOH we have late, cool springs and short cool summers.  Average high for July is only 70 F.  All told there are less than 60 days per year over 68 F/20C, not continuous but a few sprinkled early and late.   Record high 88 F.  Beans and squash are iffy crops as the weather rarely sticks to averages (I wish!).  Tomatoes and peppers pretty much a greenhouse crop, although they can be okay outdoors in an exceptional year.
Microclimate is also a huge thing.  You can find or create warm and sheltered spots.
So it really comes down to experimenting in your specific place and let the plan evolve over time, as you get to know what works.
Good luck, and don't worry about what doesn't happen the first year.  Better take it slow and don't burn out. 

[Greenie DeS]

I'm Greenie, currently in the interior of BC, in sub-boreal Canada. When I was a kid I wished plant breeding still existed as a profession but since it didn't seem to I contented myself with variety trials -- mostly tomatoes-- in scraps of land near a series of rental apartments in the pacific northwest.

Four years ago I moved up north to a dense clay acreage with short, cool growing seasons and intense winters (maybe 90 frost-free days and never warmer than 25C or so, more often 20C and 5-10C overnight, lows of -40 in winter).

The first year I put pigs on the grass to get rid of the sod. The second year I tried my favorite tomatoes from down south but in a greenhouse, got evacuated for wildfires, and had all my labels pulled out by crows. The third year I put in a utilitarian single-reliable-variety garden and was so bored that I barely tended it, plus it rained all year and never broke 20C, even the brassicas were sad.

This year I decided to have some fun and am putting in a 55-variety short-season tomato trial in a field, with regularly-placed exserted varieties to see what they can catch for next year. I'm trialing 15 wheats and 5 barleys, 20 squashes, various ground-cherries and tomatillos, and optimistically even a half-dozen melons and some very short-season flour and flint corns. Plus assorted brassicae etc. I'm very interested to see what I can get without a greenhouse up here, and to move things in the direction of not just short seasons but ability to produce in my cool short summers. I've also developed a fascination with haskap/honeyberry and plan to do some crosses on those. They're spectacular here.

I have a personal goal of producing 75% of my calories on the property, which looked like a lot of pork, goose, eggs, potatoes, and fermented brassicas without much grain or sweet last year.

I followed William S here recently as I was trying to track down the results of his tomatoes-from-seed etc project from permies.org, it's somewhat in line with where I eventually want to go with my trials up here and I wish I'd found it earlier. I did steal his stake-flags-as-markers which is one of those little things that makes life better.

Anyhow, I have no idea if I'll manage to ripen more than a handful of tomatoes or a single squash or melon this year but at least I'm not bored. This year's results will inform next year's plan: eventually I'd like to work towards, not just things that ripen, but crops that work in my mixed animal system and maybe eventually in mixed-crop fields that I can rotate pigs through and just skim a little off the top for myself, chaos-garden style. That's a long way away, though. Everything also needs to be self-sufficient for a week or two at a time throughout the summer since my job takes me into the field intermittently.

I also have a deep appreciation for perennial greens since they're up and going here long before anything else can get going. If anyone is working on anything along those lines, especially sorrel or de-stinging nettle, I'm very interested. In the much longer term, the deliciously licoricey sweet ciciley seems like it'd be great material for ...better roots? Forcing shoots? It looks fun.

Glad to find this forum, and I'll be keeping a sharp eye out for anything that produces calories or flavour without a lot of summer heat.

(And yes, I suppose anyone who gets in has passed a problem-solving test around how to answer the "elephant smaller than a mouse!" question!)

[Steph S]

Hmm I suppose plant breeding must be about a lot of tiny elephants in the room, then. 
Interesting projects you have Greenie.  I look forward to hearing about them.
If you find any tomatoes you can direct seed and get fruit with 90 frost free days, let me know!

We have similar summer temperatures, but I think our frost free are nominally around 120.
That being said, I'm sitting here waiting for rain to turn into snow as forecast, our high today 3C. 

Will also be interested to hear about your wheat and barley trials.  I have a few in the ground myself this year, but a total newb as regards wheat and most other grain, I have tried a few seeds here and there but I would really like to find something I can grow a bunch of seed out and use as a garlic rotation.

[William Schlegel]

Hi Greenie,

Tomato adventures! Yaay. Glad you found my garden inspiring. Your plan sounds fun. What varieties do you have planted? 55 sounds like a lot of varieties. In 2017 when I did simething very similar and planted a very large number of varieties my takeaway was about ten favorites, but ten is maybe still too many. Especially with red tomatoes. In the F1 and F2 generations I ended up with a lot I knew must have crossed with something red. Hard to distinguish. However, I think if I were starting over I would try to really narrow it down even more. Maybe four or five varieties instead of ten. Some of my original ten I have yet to do anything with except I keep planting a few most years. Though I also didn't know which would be the most exciting until I tried them! So I hope it works out as well for you as it did for me.

[Greenie DeS]

Hello William and Steph!

I had a volunteer Maya & Sion (Casey's) that got to bloom stage last year, I suspect I'm a long way out from direct seeding success in a normal year. The grains are spectacular on their dry sandy south slope where they compete with aspen roots; prelude was the first to head up but we'll see how yield and baking quality look... and then what happens next year, whatever that looks like.

55 tomatoes is indeed a lot! My hope for this year was to winnow down to 10 that would ripen fruit at all here and maybe 3 that would ripen more than one fruit and taste good, days to maturity isn't a great guide up here with how cool it stays. Well, how cool it normally stays. Now I will not get that data unless this year takes an abrupt turn but there's still information to be gathered; at least I can figure out which ones are tasty or otherwise appealing. I'd be happy to share what I've got planted, though it's a real grab bag; where is a reasonable place to do that?

I'm very much looking forward to seeing what my pollen trap row does. I've never worked with that much diversity in tomatoes.

[Chad Meyer]

Hello, my name is Chad Meyer.  I'm old enough to remember the USSR and the last time the Twins won the World Series, but barely.  I've been growing and experimenting on plants since middle school; my experiments on common beans won me a couple of science fairs back in the day. I grew up in Minnesota with a short-ish growing season, but plenty of rain and good soil. Now I live in northern New Mexico at 6300' with soil that has similar moisture levels and nutritional profile to lunar regolith. My garden proper is about 45'x4-5', so not a large area, but it stretches E-W and is along the north end of the lot, so I can put things like pole beans along the back and still have most of the space to work with.  I have a PhD in physics and work on software design for simulation modeling. I'm a lifelong learner and turn every hobby into an opportunity to study: I take as much joy in painting, cooking, gardening, woodworking, etc. as I do learning about the history, science, processes involved in each.  I've got four kids (ages 7 to 2 months), so plenty of help (or sometimes "help") for the garden.  We homeschool, and the garden is a surprisingly useful hands-on educational lab.  Growing oddball crops seems to run in the family as well; my grandfather always grew strange things in Minnesota and his father before him had as well.  I've heard stories of Minnesota okra and peanuts that they grew.

As I said, I've been gardening on and off (mostly on) for most of my life. Moving to the High Desert stretched my know-how, and a couple of years of near-total garden failures almost caused me to give up on gardening completely. Interestingly, the two things that spurred me on were that my wife told me that I wouldn't be able to do it, and that I happened to find a handful of beans one spring from a single plant that produced beans when I thought none had. Those got re-planted and performed much better than the other half envelope of beans I planted next to them. 

The pandemic catalyzed a shift my gardening habits. First, I couldn't buy either seeds or seed starting supplies, so I had to plant what I had: old, improperly stored half packets of various kinds, saved beans and seeds from the chiles hanging in my pantry. I also had to improvise, starting seeds on coffee filters and planting those in egg cartons. Second, working from home meant that I could watch my garden out the window all the time, and rather than wandering over to the proverbial water cooler, I wandered into the garden. This resulted in a greater awareness of the goings-on of the garden and interested me in learning more. I happened upon Joseph Lofthouse's series on landrace gardening and I was immediately hooked! I already grew my chiles that way but wanted to try the approach on all manner of growing things, so I planned out things I wanted to acquire/grow/try.

This year, I'm continuing to grow an increasingly diverse selection of snap pole beans, tepary beans, tomatoes, chiles, peanuts, okra, peas, squash, melons, cucumbers, pumpkins, corn and greens. Some things that I am growing are plants which I've tried with limited to no success in the past, because I love a challenge.  The beans are great and are the pride of my garden.  Tomatoes always do well; my "abuse" usually induces them to develop deep roots and not need any irrigation once the monsoons start.  This is the first year I've had enough confidence to not purchase any tomato starts at the hardware store as a hedge/backup. Chiles don't quite grow like weeds, but the kinds I grow are locals.  I've had poor results from the various cucurbits I've grown in the past. 

The okra is a tough one; I've never succeeded in growing that yet, and all my in-laws from more humid regions tell me it will be impossible.  I started with 3 packets including one I bought on a whim from the home improvement store rack which contained a few (otherwise unnamed) varieties.  Of 100 seeds planted in the ground, I think I got maybe 30 germinated.  Most of them are still stuck on their first set of true leaves (some haven't even sprouted their true leaves yet), but we'll see what happens.  I want to baby these just to prove everyone wrong!

My plans for the short-to-medium term future include: (1) diversifying some of my plants: I will likely need more okra genetics if I want them to reliably produce here; I'd like to add some bean varieties that are known to outcross more than average; since peanuts seem to be growing well, it would be nice to add in more of those as well; I am dissatisfied with the peas I've been growing, and would like to find varieties that climb high and make nice snap peas to form the basis of a new population (2) picking a cucurbit to focus on because I really don't have enough space to grow/trial/breed all of the kinds I stuck in the ground this year, (3) attempting a manual cross or a few; the beans could probably benefit the most but they are also the hardest; if the okra gets to that point, I'll try it there; the cucurbits would be easy, but see 2 above... and finally (4) trying to recruit any of my friends/colleagues/neighbors to grow along with me.